Service Announcement

scheduled Outage

[Auckland] A100 GPU Hypervisor Maintenance

• Start: Sun, 13 Sep 2026 9:00p.m. (UTC) (scheduled), Planned end: Fri, 18 Sep 2026 6:00a.m. (UTC)

Kia Ora,

ACTION REQUIRED

We are moving the A100 GPU hypervisor to our GPU reservation system to enable the A100 GPUs to be shared fairly through bookable time slots.

This requires you to delete your current A100 instance, and it cannot be done for you without data loss. A GPU instance cannot be migrated, please back up your data and delete your instance before the migration window opens.

When

Migration Window: Monday, 14 September 2026 – Friday, 18 September 2026
Deadline: Please complete the actions below before 9 AM – Monday, 14 September 2026.

Actions required by researchers

Back up your ephemeral disk (usually /dev/vdb) by downloading its contents, or by copying them to a volume. The ephemeral disk is permanently deleted when the instance is deleted, and a snapshot does not include it. If you keep only a snapshot, anything on /dev/vdb is lost.
Back up your root disk by taking a snapshot of the instance. The root disk is also permanently deleted when the instance is deleted.
Delete the virtual machine.

Note: Neither of these backups can be recovered after the instance is gone, so please check that your snapshot has finished and that your ephemeral data has copied successfully before you delete anything.

Any instance still running when the migration window opens will be deleted as part of the migration.

Post-migration steps

Once the A100 is in the reservation system, all existing users will be given a 12-week reservation — you do not need to apply for one.
After 12 weeks you can extend your reservation, if a slot is available.
You can then rebuild your instance from the snapshot you took, and restore your ephemeral data.

You will receive separate emails about your reservation when it is created, when it becomes active, 7 days before it is deleted, and when it is deleted.

Documentation for GPU instances is available at the VM handbook, and reservations are managed at https://portal.cer.auckland.ac.nz/gpu.

If you have any questions regarding this notice, please contact us by replying to this email or by emailing <support@ehelp.edu.au>.

We apologise sincerely for any inconvenience caused by this outage.

Regards,
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland