Changing the State of a Farm

You can perform the following state changes to deployed farms:

• Activate a deployed farm

• Place an active farm on standby

• Inactivate a standby farm

• Reactivate a standby farm

When an Active farm goes into a Standby state, all storage volumes are preserved, but hardware is returned to the free pool. Specifically, all elements, excluding storage, are returned to the idle pool. You can deactivate a farm (make a farm inactive), and retain the farm as a template, or you can delete the farm.

After the farm is placed on Standby, you can request reactivation of this farm and return the farm to the Active state. An Inactive farm cannot be reactivated. However, the SaveAs feature enables you to create copies of the inactive farm design that may be edited and submitted for activation.

Placing a Farm On Standby

The Standby state is a convenient way to free most of the resources used by an otherwise idle farm. The Standby state also preserves the farm's design and data for easy and rapid reactivation at a later date.

In the Standby state, servers and load balancers are returned to the free pool. The farm design, including the network configuration, resources, such as, IP addresses and VLANs, and disk data are preserved.

• In the case of servers with local disks, the system makes an image copy of all disks before wiping the volumes and returning the servers to the free pool.

• All contract quotas and monitoring configurations information are preserved.

Deactivating a Farm

The Control Center enables you to deactivate a farm. When deactivated, the farm is completely decommissioned, thus freeing and clearing all resources for other uses. Only the associated design and history are retained and tracked as an inactive farm in the Control Center.

If the farm includes an Ethernet-connected device as represented by an Ethernet Port element connection in the Control Center Editor design, ensure that this device is disconnected manually as part of the deactivation. Otherwise, the device IP address could be reallocated to another user's new farm, thus presenting a security risk.