IT Automation

Turbonomic has always considered customer environment, cost and effectiveness as one of its top priorities, and always going the extra mile for the features. Sequential Resize is one of those great features that will increase the environment stability.

In the real world, one always wishes to be concise, be it action, execution, potential savings, at the same time we also need to consider individual environment health, strength and capabilities. With that in mind, Turbonomic came up with the feature named sequential resize, which is about grouping related actions together so that two Virtual Machines in a group won’t be taken down simultaneously, ensuring availability and performance for the affected entities.

Lets assume a hypothetical scenario where sequential resize is disabled

1. Your environment consist of 5 VMs and
2. All VMs have resize action due to consistent resizing being enabled
3. All VMs have their action executed at the same time
4. All VMs down at the same time
5. Therefore, the entire application is down

To alleviate the aforementioned situation, Turbonomic introduced the sequential resize feature, where VMs in a sequential resizing group will resize one VM at a time, one per broadcast cycle and only when the previous VM has completed execution.

Let's consider the same above scenario with sequential resize enabled

1. Your environment consist of 5 VMs and
2. All have resize action due to consistent resize enabled
3. VM1 will be resize in broadcast cycle1 (only 1 VM1 is down and rest are all up, so env is still running)
4. VM2 will be resize in broadcast cycle2 (only 1 VM2 is down and rest are all up, so env is still running)
5. Similarly all VMs will be resized with no impact on the running environment 

Note - this is possible for action generation -> automated setting only

How to Enable the Feature

By default sequential resize will be unchecked, however user can enable it with enabling consistent resize and select checkbox for sequential resize.

Where to find the setting

Policy -> New Automation Policy -> Virtual Machine -> Scaling Constraints -> Consistent Resizing -> Enable -> Run automated resize in sequence (Check / Uncheck)

Another place to check at VM level (VM -> Policies -> VM Settings -> Scaling Constraints), only after applying to policy.

Example and Setup

Create a group of VMs

Create Automation Policy (with automation workflow selecting

action type -> resize actions and 

action generation -> Automated)

Observe similar kind action present on VMs, since it is consistent resize

Note - only 1 action is schedule to execute others are blocked, since policy has schedule attached it is scheduled, if no schedule is attached action will execute immediately 

Details of Scheduled action

Details of Blocked action