1. Upgrade Nebula to OpenStack Newton
During the upgrade, expect VMs to be unavailable for 2 to 3 days.
You will not be able to create new VMs during the upgrade.
We will attempt to do a live migration of the VMs from Kilo to Newton but we can’t guarantee that they won’t go down.
We plan to complete the upgrade by January 16, 2017.
We will inform you before we start.

2. Live Migration
The move to live migration will be completed before the system is upgraded.
If you still have VMs on the old compute nodes you will be notified.
Let us know when the VMs can be shut down to move them.
Once migrated we shouldn’t have to shut them down again.
You can check status from the action log, there will be “migrate” and “confirm resize” entries.

3. Newton Changes
The dashboard has some UI changes but retains the same basic functions.
Newton has added a wizard for creating instances.
There are changes to the API if you are using scripts to communicate with Nebula.

4. LDAP We plan to modify Nebula to use LDAP for user authentication.
At that point you will be using your Kerberos login on the system.
We will first reconfigure Nebula to require https for communicating with the APIs.
We will notify you before we make the change.

5. Use volumes
Use flavors with smaller disk images if you can and attach volumes to your VM for storage.
It is faster and better for the system.
You can boot from a volume, it acts as your live disk.
You pick up where you left off when you restart.
Creating a snapshot pauses your VM, using a volume doesn’t.
A volume can only be associated with one instance.

6. Images and snapshots Images are loaded by the system administrator.
When you take a snapshot, it is a complete copy and is no longer dependent on the original image.
Out of date images aren’t removed, live migration requires that they still exist for running VMs that were started from them.
In the future we plan to append their names with “Do Not Use”.
Snapshots can be deleted even if running VMs were started from them but it can cause problems.

7. Clean up Terminate running VMs that you no longer need.
Make sure you are not accidently deleting VMs that belong to other members of your group.
Good idea to include your name as part of your VMs name so you can find it later.
Delete snapshots that you no longer need.