Hard reboot

General concept

If an instance is unresponsive (does not reply to commands), a hard reboot of the instance is the same as pulling the power cord on a physical computer, a soft reboot sends a signal to the operating system and waits for it to try to reboot on its own.

Tip

Aside from actually rebooting the instance, a hard reboot will also redefine the instance on the hypervisor.

This means that the instance will get the latest hardware version in the platform which is good for keeping compatible with the evolving ecosystem of OpenStack.

We recommend doing an occasional hard reboot when the instance is already powered off.

Doing a hard reboot

The hard reboot option is only available via OpenStack Horizon or OpenStack Terminal Client.

We recommend checking out our guides on working with these platforms if you normally only work with the Cloud management portal.

Important

Be careful when doing a hard reboot as it will not care about the state of the operating system or your applications, for example any writes to the disk in the middle of a hard reboot will get interrupted, potentially causing data loss.

We recommend this action as a last resort, or that you hard reboot after the operating system has halted.

Hard reboot using the OpenStack Horizon portal

To hard reboot an instance by using the Cloud management portal

  • Press Compute and then Instances in the sidebar menu.

  • Press the dropdown button Actions

  • Press Hard reboot instance

  • Press the confirmation button (Hard reboot instance).

  • Wait until the progress bar has finished.

The instance will start again (even if hard rebooted from a powered off state).

Hard reboot using the OpenStack terminal client

To hard reboot an instance by using the OpenStack Terminal Client

  • Run this command: openstack server list. Save the name of the instance you want to hard reboot.

  • Run this command: openstack server reboot --hard [SERVER NAME], replacing the values in angle brackets by the information from the previous steps.

The instance will start again (even if hard rebooted from a powered off state).