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Status Planned for future release
Categories Power
Created by Guest
Created on May 1, 2023

Power image capture/import/export should support more than one concurrent operation

We build custom images of AIX and Linux (based on IBM stock images) for creating our VMs in our IBM Cloud Power Systems Virtual Servers workspaces. The process of building a new VM, customizing it, capturing that as an image, creating a new VM from that image and testing it, exporting it to IBM Cloud Object Storage, and importing that image to our other workspaces takes over two hours.

Two hours is already poor performance, but the design of PowerVS multiplies this slowness: According to https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-importing-boot-image :
The new Power Systems Virtual Server VM Capture, Image Export, and Image Import features are restricted to one operation at a time per Power Systems Virtual Server workspace. If one of these operations is submitted successfully, then another new operation for VM Capture, Image Export, and Image Import cannot be submitted until the previous operation is complete.

The architectural restriction of only one image capture/import/export operation at a time means when we rebuild all of our images, they must be scheduled in series rather than parallel. If we have 8 OS versions (AIX 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, CentOS 8, RHEL 8.4, RHEL 8.6, SLES 15.3, SLES 15.4), that will require over 16 hours. What's worse is that attempting a second operation while one is already in progress does not add the second operation to a queue, but immediately fails with an error.

We would like the ability to perform multiple image capture/import/export operations in the same workspace at the same time.
Idea priority Medium
Needed By Month