Administration Guide › Setting Up Reservation Manager › Reservation Manager Prerequisites › Suspend and Restart the Scheduling of Tasks

Suspend and Restart the Scheduling of Tasks

The Reservation Manager provides a scheduler feature that lets administrators suspend the start of scheduled reservation tasks to prevent jobs from running during system maintenance. When maintenance is finished, administrators can resume scheduler operations to start processing suspended tasks.

When the scheduler is suspended, all OS provisioning, software deployment and termination processing tasks that have not yet started are suspended. Additionally, all pre-, post-, and expiration actions specified in reservation templates that are to be executed as part of the reservation setup or expiration processing workflow are suspended.

Reservation tasks that are in progress at the time the scheduler is suspended are not stopped. Reservation tasks that are scheduled to run after the in progress tasks complete are started when the scheduler is restarted. For example, if a virtual machine is deployed when the scheduler is suspended, any subsequent task such as a post-action or software deployment task is not started while the scheduler is suspended.

If the maintenance activities to be performed after suspending the scheduler include stopping the Reservation Manager or CA Server Automation services, we recommend that you allow enough time for all reservation tasks that are in progress to be completed before the services are stopped. This action ensures that Reservation Manager is able to monitor the success or failure of the in progress tasks.

The following operations are not affected by suspension of the scheduler:

• User requests to change the power state of a virtual machine, take or revert snapshots, and reconfigure virtual machines
• New reservations are accepted, but are not released for provisioning while the scheduler is suspended

Notify users in advance of planned outages to give them time to extend reservations that are set to expire during the outage. They may not be able to extend reservations during the outage. We recommend that they extend their reservations beyond the duration of the planned outage. Reservations that expire while the scheduler is suspended are immediately processed when the scheduler is restarted.

To suspend and restart all provisioning tasks

1. Log in to the Reservation Manager using the CA Server Automation administrator user credentials.

   Note: You may see a message that Reservation Manager is offline for maintenance. Click Administrator Login at the bottom of the display.

   The home page opens.

2. Click the Administer Your Reservation Manager link.

   The Administration page opens.

3. Click the Maintenance link at the top right of the display.

   A dialog opens and provides the following options. Select or deselect one or both.

   Suspend pending reservation tasks

   Block web access (maintenance mode)

4. When maintenance is complete, click OK.

   Note: If maintenance lasts for more than one day, repeat these steps until maintenance is complete.