Adding a New Schedule in CLOUD TOGGLE

Schedules provide a way to control when virtual machines automatically start and stop. Creating a schedule gives the administrator the ability to specify times across each day of the week when the VM's that the schedule applies to should be on and available, and stopped and deallocated/parked. The following article explains how to create a new schedule and apply it to a group of virtual machines.

1. In the CLOUD TOGGLE side bar, click on Schedules:

2. Click on Add Schedule:

The Scheduled screen is split into two. The first part is for adding a new schedule, and the second is for scheduling the on/off times.

3. Add a New Schedule

Enter in the following information:

• Name - the name for the schedule that will appear in the list of schedules.
• Description - A description of the schedule and what it does
• Servers - The list of servers (VM's) that the schedule applies to. Click on the drop-down menu and select all of the virtual machines that this schedule should effect.
• Timezone - the timezone of the schedule. This should be set according to your schedule on/off times, i.e. if you select VM's in the schedule to power on at 10am, it will be 10am in your selected timezone.

• Schedule Type - This is the type of schedule that will be used. By default it is set to 'Manual - Default Off'. This means every VM in the schedule is off by default unless they are turned on, or 'overridden' by the CLOUD TOGGLE admin or team member. 'Manual - Default On' can be chosen in this drop-down list, and will do the opposite of the schedule above and turn every VM on until it is turned off. The last option is 'Custom', which enables the Schedule Times area below.

• Ensure State - This is used for the 'Manual - default off' and 'Manual - default on' schedules only. When these schedules are used, setting this option to enabled and setting a time for it will cause all VM's to adopt the default state dictated by the schedule they are attaced to, i.e. turn them off if they are in the default off schedule, or on if in the default on schedule. This guards against someone turning on or off a VM in the cloud provider's portal which then isn't detected by CLOUD TOGGLE. If, for example, someone turns on a VM in the cloud provider portal that is a member of a default off schedule, at the specified time, CLOUD TOGGLE will send an API call to the cloud provider and issue a command to turn it off, ensuring that the VM doesn't remain on indefinitely. This call will happen at the same time every day.

         

• Resolution - This can be set to either 60, 30 or 15 minutes depending on the amount of control desired when creating the schedule. 60 minutes will allow VM uptime to be selecting in 1 hour blocks, however using a 15 minute resolution will allow finer control, allowing VM's to be scheduled in quarter-hour blocks.

4. Schedule Times - creating a custom schedule.

When creating a custom schedule, the Schedule Times area becomes active. It will be segmented into chunks of time based on the resolution selected previously (see above). In this example, we see it set to a resolution of 15 minutes. By default, all of the time segments are coloured red, meaning that the schedule starts off containing no up time at all.

To add in some up time for VM's (times when virtual machines should be powered on and available), either click on the red bars, or click and drag to select multiple bars across one or more days:

The above schedule will power on every virtual machine that it applies to between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. The rest of the time the VM's will be powered down.

5. Click on ADD when schedule creation is complete.