Stopping an instance

Sometimes, an instance will need to be stopped for a number of reasons, for example, maintenance and offline migration, yet as an OpenStack administrator, you may not want to completely destroy the instance and data associated with it. Thus, you will want to stop the instance instead.

Getting ready

To stop an instance, you will need the following:

• The openstack command-line client

• The openrc file containing appropriate credentials

• The name of the instance

How to do it…

In this example, we will be stopping the cookbook.test instance created in the Booting an instance recipe. To stop the instance, use the following steps:

1. First, we list the running instances:

   openstack server list
   

   This will bring back a list of the running instances. Consider this example:

   

2. To stop the instance, simply issue the following command:

   openstack server stop cookbook.test
   

   Note

   This command takes a few moments to complete and will not display the output if successful.

3. Now list instances to confirm the status...