Asset Substate Best Practice for Retired VM / Cloud PCs, Retired > Disposed deemed inaccurate

[sreter]

In working with our Asset Management Team, they've brought up a request to add a new Substate for Retired VMs/Cloud PCs. "Disposed" was proposed, but feedback received stated that Disposed didn't properly reflect a virtual workstation, and something like "Deleted" was more accurate. What is the best practice from what anyone has seen in handling retiring VM CI/Assets?

[SteveMacWWT]

It sounds like you're dealing with a semantic disagreement here, and I don't envy you.  

For me I would try to convince whoever you are dealing with that it is standard across the industry to refer to it that way, as it aligns with what happens with actual hardware.  Doing it differently just because it doesn't match up with the way you would say it outside of the infrastructure arena, is setting up for possible future issues. (In actuality it probably isn't in this case, but cutting off that way of thinking is better for the company in the long run.) 

Another consideration will be around the use of the lifecycle fields that SN is moving towards. While they aren't requiring usage of these in place of the various state type fields, everything new that they build will be geared towards that soon. At that point you do start to have problems. 

Depending on the clout you have, or someone else has that you could enlist in the discussion, you could also try asking the questiosn "Does calling it disposed actually impact the company's bottom line? Is it going to cause real confusion to the people who actually use it?" 

With all that being said, my guess is that you will probably have to go forward with what is being requested. In that case, I would probably look at changing the Label for Disposed, but keep the value as it is. That way, in the future when someone decides to change it back, future you just needs to change the label again. 

(Future you also includes anyone that will deal with this in the future.)