Hi Roy,

I think that what you want is 'shut off', that will turn it off as if the
power button was pressed, the OS will halt the machine, then you will turn
it on as if you pressed the button and the OS will do the boot as usual.

Shelving will save the instance state in disk, so when you unshelve it will
be as if nothing happened, but it does not use RAM from the hypervisor. I
think there has been some issues when unshelving losing the state, so might
not work 100% of the time. It will become 'shelved offloaded' eventually if
not restored, and will need to be unshelved first before using it again.

Pausing is similar, but will store the VM status in RAM, so unpausing is
faster, but uses RAM from the hypervisor while paused.

Suspend will let the OS do the suspension process, that should be similar
to pausing, but letting the OS do it (instead of openstack) and stores
everything on disk, so no RAM used.

Docs here:
https://docs.openstack.org/ocata/user-guide/cli-stop-and-start-an-instance.html
(though they don't mention shut off for some reason :/) and
https://docs.openstack.org/api-guide/compute/server_concepts.html (that
mentions shut off, but does not say much about paused).


If you need a quicker revert that waiting for the OS to boot, you can try
to 'pause' it first for a second if anything should break right away, and
if nothing breaks in 5min or so unpause and shut it off for longer (so it
uses no resources).

On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 6:17 PM Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:

> I have a VPS instance that I think can be shut down.  What I want to do is
> shut it down in a way that I can restart it again without losing anything,
> but not yet commit to deleting it.  The idea is to leave it in that state
> for a while just to make sure there's no dependencies on it that i've
> missed.  Do I want to pause it, suspend it, or shelve it?  What's the
> difference between those three?
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