New feature; Snapshot in a multi node profile.

Hi all. We have added a feature to make it a bit easier to take snapshots within a multi node profile. This feature is accessed from the per-node context menu; click and you will see a new option in the menu, "Snapshot". 

If you select that, you will be shown the following modal:

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The first check box asks if you want to update your profile after the snapshot has completed, by changing all of the nodes that are running the same image, to use the new image. In general you want to leave this box checked, unless you want to edit the source code yourself. 

If you have several nodes in your profile, all running different images, and you want to take snapshots of, each one you have to do each one individually via the context menu for each node. 

The second checkbox is to address the problem that many users have with accounts and groups getting deleted when you take a snapshot. This typically happens when you install a software package that adds a user and/or group. Those get deleted by default, but if you check the box above, they will be retained permanently (you don't need to check the box the next time you take a snapshot). Note that your user account is always deleted no matter what, to encourage you not to build in dependencies on specific user directories. :-)

The reason this is not the default, is because in general you do not want to take the chance that an account with a bad password will be propagated forward to every time you create a new image.

As always, comments welcome we always want to hear what people think.

Persistent Dataset

Hi all. So here is an example of how to create and use one of our persistent dataset types; an image backed dataset. This is a dataset that you create using a temporary file system, capture, and then reuse in other profiles. Each time you use it, you get a private copy on your node(s) that you can read and write, but which is thrown away when your experiment ends. Note that you can update the "master copy" of the dataset later if needed.  Hopefully this html with images will come across okay!

Step 1:  Start an instance of the public Temp-Datastore profile. This example profile will provide you with an extra 30GB file system mounted at /mydata.

Step 2:  Login to your node (or use the shell in your browser) and populate /mydata. When you are done, log off of the node so that the data can be captured cleanly.

Step 3: Go to Actions->Create Dataset. Choose a name for your dataset and which project to associate it with. Click on Image Backed dataset. From the drop down menu, choose the Temp-Datastore experiment that you started up  in Step 1. You will see the next three fields filled in automatically:

Step 4: Click create. There will be a delay of a few seconds, be patient! In a bit you will see the image capture progress modal. When the image capture process is completed you will see the following (and you will receive an email message):

Step 5: Dismiss the modal, you will see the details of your new dataset. The most important bit of data is the "urn" of your dataset. This is what you need to use your dataset in another profile.

Step 6: Now make a copy of the Image-Dataset public profile. On the edit page for your new profile, click on the Source button, and then replace the urn in the blockstore tag with urn of your new dataset:

Step 7: Click on Accept and then Save your profile changes. Then click on Instantiate. When your experiment has setup, you can log into your node, and cd to /mydata to see your data.

Step 8: If later, you want to update the contents of your dataset, then go back to the Show Dataset page shown in Step 5, and click on Snapshot.