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Task Manager Cancel Task

Task Cancellation

Summary

A Task Cancellation it is feature which should allow to cancel currently running tasks. It is not clear which task should be allow to cancel - the whole command or task which is running at vdsm side, what engine should do roll forward or revert

Owner

  • Name: Michael Kublin
  • GUI Component owner: Michael Kublin
  • REST Component owner: Michael Kublin
  • QA Owner: Yaniv Kaul ykaul@redhat.com

Current status

  • Target Release: 3.2
  • Status: Coding ( Engine-Not started, UI-Not started, API-Not started )
  • Last updated date: 3/12/2012

Detailed Description

A Task Manager cancellation it is a feature which is build upon Task Manager and should allow to cancel a tasks/jobs/commands

Terminology

  • Command - An execution unit which performs a business logic.
  • Job - An action API (RunAction) running in the system. The Job may extend beyond the life cycle of the Command which is the entry point for the action.
  • Step - A meaningful part of the job which the user should be aware of.
  • Task - known as VDSM task, executed by VDSM.

The job supports the following scenarios:

  1. A simple command - a command which consists of 2 steps: validation (CanDoAction) and execution.
    • The job ends when the command of the job ends.
  2. A command with VDSM tasks - a command which consists of 3 steps: validation (CanDoAction), execution and finalization (endAction).
    • The job ends when the tasks are reported from VDSM as completed and the command endAction is invoked.
  3. A command which invokes internal commands
    • By default, the internal command will not be presented as a step of the parent command.
  4. A customized command - an asynchronous job which its termination is decided by an event other than tasks. There are few types of scenarios for it:
    • Commands which implements the IVdcAsyncCommand interface - triggered by VDSBrokerFrontendImpl.RunAsyncVdsCommand, the command instance is maintained with its context and finalized by the monitors (VdsUpdateRuntimeInfo).
    • Invocation of command in a detached thread, e.g AddVdsCommand which delegates job resolution to the internal command InstallVdsCommand.
    • The command execution is ended, but the resolution for the success of the Action is determined by other event in the system:
      • Other events which reported by the monitors (e.g. Host Maintenance reported by VdsEventListener).
      • Requires heuristic decision to select the correct Step for the Job by entity type and entity id associated with the Job.
  5. Multiple Action Runner - describes multiple commands invocation in a single API call. Each command will be reflected as a single job.

Requirements

Not defined yet

Backend

This section describes the backend design for this feature.

Entity Description

A new command will be added CancelTaskCommand

Enumerators

Updated Enumerators The new value will be added to VdcActionType

Annotations

DB Design

CRUD

User work-flows

User will send request to backend for cancel task and backend will try to cancel task. When we are running internal command which parent jobId is cancelled engine can try not to run it. If a job has tasks which is running on vdsm, engine can try to send a Stop/Revert verb to vdsm, at that case by default behaviour all command will be finished as failed.

Simple Command Invocation Sequence Diagram

Not provided, not clear what are requirements

Async Command Invocation Sequence Diagram

Not provided, not clear what are requirements

Events

REST API

User Experience

Installation/Upgrade

The cancellation of the task is depend on VDSM API, on internal Async task manger, on correct handling of each command and on task monitoring. Most of these mechanism are independent and not related to each other, most of them has a lot of luck and problems in implementation, the cancellation of task which is build upon on it well not work well until those mechanism will be fixed.

Documentation / External references

Comments and Discussion

I suppose that a number of races, and unexpected behaviour will be extreme high I suppose that part of the flows will be difficult or almost impossible to integrate with task cancellation

Open Issues

  1. What expected API should be called at VDSM side and what it suppose to do?
  2. What should be allowed to cancel? Maintenance host, Migrate VM? Hibernate VM or only storage flows