Retire vs Retirement date

Question
#1

Good day,
In our current process retirement also performs the step of deleting the vm object from Vmware or Azure. What i would like to do is modify our current process to perform everything except waiting for a time frame before it performs the actual vm deletion. Then after that time frame the process would complete deletion and notify the appropriate teams.

Is it possible to used timed retirement in that manner?

Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated as i am fairly new to manageiq.
Thank you

Jason

#2

We are doing exactly what you are describing.

First we disabled the default “Lifecycle > Retirement”-Button in Configuration and replaced it with a CustomButton
The Custom Button executes a pretty simple state machine, which basically does something like this

vm = $evm.root['vm']
cooldown_phase = 4.weeks
disable_monitoring_for_vm(vm)
remove_visibility_tags(vm)
send_email_notification_to_vm_owner(vm, "Hey your VM is about to be deleted")
vm.stop
vm.retires_on = Time.now + cooldown_phase

This StateMachine only powers the VM off and sends a warning to the VM owner. If we get an angry email from the user, that we should not delete the VM, we simple power it back on and remove the retirement date in the UI.

Once the retirement-date is reached, ManageIQ will automatically start to retire the VM. This means, that it will call /Infrascructure/ VM/Retirement/StateMachines/VMRetirement/Default If you do all your retirement steps in this StateMachine, the VM should be deleted automatically 4 weeks after the user initialized retirement

Because you said you are new to ManageIQ, I am going to link 2 ebooks about Automation in ManageIQ (the first one is the important one)
https://pemcg.gitbooks.io/mastering-automation-in-cloudforms-4-2-and-manage/content/
https://manageiq.gitbook.io/mastering-cloudforms-automation-addendum/

Retirement Function - delete/archive VM
#3

Thank you very much for the reply Buc.