"Okay. So at the moment I'm leaning towards sending out a
non-personalised public email to announce@ a month before the work,
with all the details, which will include a list of host machines.
That will also include the offer of moving customer VMs ahead of the
work if necessary."

That does seem the simplest and most logical way to do it

Keith

On Thu, 18 Mar 2021 at 14:03, Andy Smith <andy@bitfolk.com> wrote:
Hi Andy,

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 01:40:04PM +0000, Andy Bennett wrote:
> >I'm not picking on you specifically because a lot of people have
> >said and will say the same, but I need to work out in each case what
> >it actually means.
>
> No worries!

Thanks, this is helpful - it's certain there would be things that
needed clarifying, but not easy without knowing what!

> Ah! I assumed that the new hosts would have different names to the existing
> ones.

Indeed no, we're literally just going to be:

- turning some servers off
- removing them from the rack
- opening them to install 10GE NICs
- closing them again
- installing them in another rack in another room
- switching them on again

…at which point we expect all the VMs on them to boot up as they were
before with no visible change from the customer's point of view
apart from having been shutdown for however long it took to do that.

This would be relatively simple (if unwelcome) if it wasn't for the
issue of the rolling upgrades that are ongoing and causing customer
VMs to move about.

> I don't require a personalised message provided I can work out when my VM
> will be moving.

Okay. So at the moment I'm leaning towards sending out a
non-personalised public email to announce@ a month before the work,
with all the details, which will include a list of host machines.
That will also include the offer of moving customer VMs ahead of the
work if necessary.

I do have some concerns that there may be customers who aren't
subscribed to announce@, even though they are supposed to be¹, so I
think we will still send out a direct email to affected customers a
week before the work. If it's a surprise to anyone at that point it
will be unwelcome but at least they still have time to prepare for
it, and we do have the justification that they should have been on
the announce list.

Cheers,
Andy

¹ If you're reading this, you are subscribed, because anything
  posted to announce@ goes here too.

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