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To enable more control over cloud operations, users can create virtual machine action plans to run tasks for virtual machines and Docker workloads. Virtual machine action plans are for both private and public cloud and are an important autoscaling functionality on the platform. A VM can have mutliple action plans

In the user interface, in the new Virtual appliances view on the Control tab, users can manage Action plans and Triggers that run the action plans.

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Create an action plan

Before you create an action plan, first create a virtual machine. To create an action plan:

1. Open the Control tab of the virtual appliance and click the + button 
2. Enter the action plan details
3. Add actions, by clicking the + Add button, selecting the action type from the pulldown list and entering the parameters as required. Consider the following constraints on actions
   
   1. Maintenance block: You can create one complete maintenance block (start maintenance, action(s), and stop maintenance) and the maintenance block cannot contain any scaling actions
   2. Scale in and/or scale out actions: You can only scale in and/or scale out at the end of the action plan but you can create the scaling action(s) in any order (e.g. scale in first, only scale in)
   3. Email actions: You can perform an email action at any time, including after scaling actions
   4. Platform contstraints: For example, to create an instance, the VM must be deployed and powered off 
   5. Hypervisor constraints: For example, when using hot reconfigure on ESXi, you cannot decrement CPU or RAM 

Put the actions in run order using the arrow buttons. Delete actions as required using the trash can button to the left of the action name.

To run the action plan automatically, go to the Triggers tab and create an alert or schedule trigger. 

Run an action plan now

When you have added some actions and saved the action plan, you can run the action plan immediately to test it. Edit the action plan and click the Execute action plan button, which is beside the + add button to create a new action. 

Abiquo recommends that you run an action plan manually to test it before you create a trigger to run it automatically.

Create a trigger

Abiquo supports two types of triggers to run action plans: Alerts and Schedules. 

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To run your action plan based on monitoring metrics, you can select an existing virtual appliance alert to trigger an Action plan. Click the + Add button and select the Alert. For details about creating an alert, see Manage Monitoring Alerts

To run your action plan automatically at selected dates and times, create a schedule trigger.

Delete an action plan

If you delete an action plan, Abiquo will also delete the schedule associated with that action plan.