Before Electing a New Pool Master [feedly]

----
Before Electing a New Pool Master
// Latest blog entries

Overview

The following is a reminder of specific steps to take before electing a new pool master - especially in High Availability-enabled deployments.  Albeit, there are circumstances where this will happen automatically due to High Availability (by design) or in an emergency situation, but never-the-less, the following steps should be taken when electing a new pool master where High Availability is enabled.

Disable High Availability

Before electing a new master one must disable High Availability.  The reason is quite simple:

If a new host is designated as master with HA enabled, the subsequent processes and transition time can lead to HA see that a pool member is down.  It is doing what it is supposed to do from the "mathematical" sense, but from "reality" it is actually confused.

The end result is that HA could either recover with some time or fence as it attempts to apply fault tolerance in contradiction to the desire to "simply elect a new master".

It is also worth noting that upon recovery - if any Guests which had a mounted ISO are rebooted on another host - that "VDI not found" errors can appear although this is not the case.  The ISO image that is mounted is seen as a VDI and if that resource is not available on another host, the Guest VM will fail to resume: presenting the generic VDI error.

Steps to Take

HA must be disabled and for safe practice, I always recommend ejecting all mounted ISO images.  The latter can be accomplished by executing the following from the pool master:

xe vm-cd-eject --multiple

As for HA it can be disabled in two ways: via the command-line or from XenCenter.

From the command line of the current pool master, execute:

xe pool-ha-disable

xe pool-sync

If desired - just for safe guarding one's work - those commands can be executed on every other pool member.

As for XenCenter one can select the Pool/Pool Master icon in question and from the "HA" tab, select the option to disable HA for the pool.

Workload Balancing

For versions of XenServer utilizing Workload Balancing it is not necessary to halt this.

Now that HA is disabled, switch Pool Masters and when all servers are in an active state: re-enable HA from XenCenter or from the command line:

xe pool-recover-slaves

xe pool-ha-enable

I hope this is helpful and as always: questions and comments are welcomed!

 

--jkbs | @xenfomation

----

Shared via my feedly reader

Sent from my iPhone