Bug 693437

Summary: Provide easy way how to stash work
Product: [Retired] Beaker Reporter: David Kovalsky <dkovalsk>
Component: beahAssignee: beaker-dev-list
Status: CLOSED EOL QA Contact: tools-bugs <tools-bugs>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: 0.6CC: amarecek, atodorov, azelinka, benl, bpeck, mastyk, mcsontos, mmalik, ohudlick, stl, tools-bugs, xtian
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: FutureFeature
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard: Cloud
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2020-02-11 12:14:06 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 593663    

Description David Kovalsky 2011-04-04 16:55:09 UTC
It seems that many people camp on machines in Beaker because they have started some work and want to finish it the next day. Then weekend, other priority work or PTO comes and machines are unused. 

We could partly eliminate that by allowing a simple method to stash the work. Ideally image of the whole system.

Pretty easy for virt machines - freeze, save disk image, save ram. Or snapshot. The machine is freed and one can return anytime to working where left off. 


Not sure how hard this would be for bare metal, but I believe that even an rsync save/restore or reboot/PXE/create-disk-image and the ability to restore would help. 


I know that one can do a backup to a workstation (or where ever). The key point is to make this easy for users - one click in the web ui or simple command line one can run.

Comment 1 Raymond Mancy 2011-04-04 22:07:43 UTC
I think this could be very useful.

Comment 2 Petr Muller 2011-04-05 09:37:53 UTC
I would love to see this one. It would reduce box camping, at least in my case.

Comment 3 Ales Zelinka 2012-10-04 11:33:09 UTC
This would (hopefully) solve one the biggest Beaker pains: slow provisioning:

1) stash clean installs of most used distros (e.g. rhel5.8, rhel6.3, ...)
2) allow anyone use those stashed distros for _quick_ provisioning (restore from image: +- 5minutes vs full anaconda install: +-20minutes)
3) use it transparently in workflows: use shashed image by default, fallback to full install only if stashed image not found or requested by user.

Comment 4 Dan Callaghan 2012-10-10 05:16:18 UTC
I think it would make sense to implement this using disk snapshots of some sort in RHEV, once Beaker supports it. It's probably not practical for bare metal systems.

Comment 5 Nick Coghlan 2012-10-17 04:37:57 UTC
Bulk reassignment of issues as Bill has moved to another team.

Comment 6 Aleš Mareček 2012-11-14 09:06:45 UTC
Greetings!
Any news? How it's going with this bug? I'd love this new funcionality. I think it will be very usefull for us - users.

Comment 7 Raymond Mancy 2012-11-15 22:40:24 UTC
Hi Aleš,

We are not currently looking at this specific solution. Our more immediete goals are to quantify resource usage, so then we can go about making our permissions model and scheduler work in a more efficient manner and hopefully reduce issues surrounding resource shortages.

Comment 8 Ales Zelinka 2012-11-16 13:46:39 UTC
I did some bean counting back in 2011 regarding the time spent on provisioning vs time spent on the actual tasks. The results: installations take about 20% of the time (for tasks without reservesys). And we're already compensating for this by stacking lots of task together, the number would be much higher if we'd run separate tasks separately.

So my semi-educated guess is you'll find out that implementing some sort of quick provisioning will greatly help "reduce issues surrounding resource shortages.". Please keep this on your radar, thanks.

Comment 11 Martin Styk 2020-02-11 12:14:06 UTC
Beah is no longer supported by Beaker development team.
Instead of that, we are working on Restraint test harness. You can find all the features of Restraint here.

https://restraint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

If you think your RFE should be still implemented as part of Restraint feel free to create a new BZ ticket.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Restraint

In case you have any question feel free to reach out to me
Thank you,
Martin Styk <martin.styk>