Schedule a Maintenance Timeslot - Administrator Use Case

Paul is the system administrator at the datacenter of Mercury Tours. He has been working there for three years, and one of his tasks is to administer the server lab. Mercury Tours uses ALM to manage their projects and decided last year to start using Lab Management to manage the testing hosts in their server lab.

Paul has been given the task of making sure that the testing hosts remain healthy. He uses Lab Management to maintain his servers. One of his typical tasks is to schedule a maintenance timeslot for one of the testing hosts so he can work on them. Paul uses the following checklist to arrange for the timeslot.

  • Prerequisites for scheduling a maintenance timeslot

  • Create my new maintenance timeslot

  • Do my maintenance work during the timeslot

Paul decides to schedule a maintenance timeslot for today so he can safely shut down and install new hardware on some of his hosts. He consults his checklist and gets to work:

Paul makes sure that Lab Management is up and running properly and that his testing hosts are all registered and available.

Paul navigates to Testing > Timeslots in Lab Management. The Timeslot Reservation dialog box opens.

Reference: Timeslot Reservation: Maintenance Dialog Box

Paul enters the following details into the Timeslot Reservation fields:

  • Name: Mercury Tours host reboot
  • Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes
  • Start time: 10/12/2012, 14:00
  • End time: 10/12/2012, 15:30

Paul then clicks the Add Specific Host(s) button and selects the hosts he wants to reboot.

Paul checks his timeslot details once more and then clicks Submit. Suddenly, an error pops up!

Confused, Paul checks the Timeslot Status tab on the bottom of the Timeslot Reservation dialog box:

The message indicates that the host mercurytours_lab2, one of the testing hosts he was reserving for reboot, was already reserved during the scheduled timeslot. He cannot reserve the host for maintenance until he resolves this conflict.

Paul now has to decide what to do. He can either do his maintenance work at a different time, or he can contact the owner of the testing timeslot and find out if it's okay to move the testing timeslot.

Paul looks up the name of the tester and finds that the reserved testing timeslot belongs to John, a close friend of his. He calls John on the phone and asks if the testing timeslot can be postponed to 16:00. John is happy to accommodate Paul, and agrees.

Paul selects and opens the testing timeslot and changes the Start time of the testing timeslot. He then is able to successfully reserve his maintenance timeslot for 14:00.

At 14:00, Paul shuts down the testing hosts in his server lab and installs the new hardware. Once done, he restarts the servers and tests them. It takes him only 1 hour to finish, so he is well within the limits of his timeslot.