Manage End-of-Life VMs

You can mark a service as being in an End of Life state if you want to keep it for forensic or archival purposes and you don't want to delete it from your inventory. If you configure the End of Life policy as detailed in this topic, any time you clone or deploy a service from a service that's marked End of Life, Commander triggers the policy based on the criteria you set. For example, if you set the policy to stop a service, and then you clone a VM marked End of Life, Commander prevents the cloned VM from being powered on.

The End of Life policy changes the End of Life state for templates, but policy actions (for example, deletion) are not performed for templates. It's possible to deploy a VM from a template in the End of Life state.

The End of Life policy applies only to VMs.

• Only VMs can have the End of Life state; this state isn't supported for other service types, such as virtual services, load balancers, databases, auto scaling groups and application stacks.
• The End of Life policy and End of Life state are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

Set the End of Life state for services

You can set the End of Life state of a service to display at-a-glance information or to work with the End of Life policy by setting that policy to trigger an action when an attempt to start an End of Life service occurs.

1. Navigate to and select the service either through the tree or the Virtual Machines tab.
2. Right-click and choose Policy Enforcement > Set End of Life State.
3. In the Set EOL State dialog, enable End of Life or Not End of Life as required.
4. Click OK.

To display the End of Life state in the Details section for a VM, add the End of Life State property to the list of shown properties. For more information, see Display properties.

Configure the End of Life policy

Any configuration of this policy on a system-wide basis can affect all cloud accounts that are managed by Commander now and can affect all cloud accounts that are added to Commander in the future. If you don't want any cloud account to be automatically affected by this policy, configure the policy by selected infrastructure elements only.

1. On the Configuration page, click Add.
2. In the Policy Configuration dialog, select End of Life from the list of policies, then click Next.
3. On the Policy Name/Description page, enter a name (for example,"EOL Policy for Production", and an optional description, then click Next.
4. On the Choose a Target page, expand the Infrastructure view or the Applications view tree and select the infrastructure elements to which you want the policy to apply.

   You can't select a folder as a target.

5. On the Configure the Policy page, if you want to configure the policy but keep it turned off until you're ready to enable it, make sure Enable policy is unchecked.
6. From the Take Action menu, select from the options.

   Option	Result if the policy is triggered
   Notification Only	No action is taken. An alert is created, notifying you that the policy has triggered. See also Subscribe to Policy Alerts.
   Quarantine	The VM is quarantined. Note: If you include this action in a policy targeting services in a cloud account other than vCenter, the action will fail.
   Suspend	The VM is suspended (saved in its current state). Not supported for VMs in public cloud accounts. If you include this action in a policy targeting services in a public cloud account, the action will fail.
   Stop	The Guest OS is shut down.
   Remove from Inventory	The VM is removed from inventory. Note that the file remains in the datastore. Note: If you include this action in a policy targeting services in a cloud account other than vCenter, the action will fail.
   Delete from Disk	The service and its associated files are deleted permanently from the disk. The files are permanently deleted. They can't be recovered unless you have a backup copy. When all VMs are deleted from a virtual service through a policy action (that is, when VMs are deleted by a policy action or by a command workflow attached to an expiry policy), the empty virtual service isn't automatically deleted unless it too is targeted by policy.
   Run [Workflow]	Existing command workflows appear for selection, organized by target type. If the policy is triggered, the selected workflow is run. You must choose a workflow with a target type that matches the target of the policy; otherwise, the workflow will fail. For example, if the selected workflow's target type is "VM", the workflow will fail if the policy targets a database. A workflow with a target type of "Any Inventory Type" can be run on all service types.

   Click Add Workflow to set up a new command workflow.

7. Decide whether to allow children of the targets to have their own instance of the policy and disable this setting if required.

   If you enable this option, other instances of this policy can be applied to any infrastructure elements and services that are children of the parent infrastructure element you have selected (an override).

8. On the Summary page, if any services will be immediately affected by this policy, Commander displays the number of affected services.

   To see a list of services affected by the policy actions you selected, click Review, then click OK to return to the summary.

9. Click Finish to complete the configuration.