VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves

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CEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves

Executive summary............................................................................................................................... 2

Getting started with VCEM Profile Failover.............................................................................................. 3

Key components .............................................................................................................................. 3

Profile Failover: an example .............................................................................................................. 4

Initiating Profile Failover.................................................................................................................... 5

Profile Failover internal operations ..................................................................................................... 5

The VCEM Job Manager ............................................................................................................... 5

Failover initiation.......................................................................................................................... 5

Actions performed by the Failover Job ............................................................................................ 6

Capabilities and limitations of Profile Failover ..................................................................................... 6

Recommendations and best practices ................................................................................................. 7

Important Notes concerning hardware compatibility ................................................................................ 8

Installation and configuration checklist ................................................................................................... 8

All installations ................................................................................................................................ 8

Pre-failover installation and configuration checklist ............................................................................... 9

Configuring and managing spare bays and servers.................................................................................9

Initiating Failover manually ................................................................................................................. 10

Initiating Failover using HP SIM Automatic Event Handling ..................................................................... 12

Concepts ...................................................................................................................................... 12

Choosing HP SIM events for Failover................................................................................................ 13

HP SIM monitoring ..................................................................................................................... 13

Determining a critical server hardware failure................................................................................ 13

Reporting critical events from a server........................................................................................... 14

The HP SIM “System Unreachable” event ...................................................................................... 14

Failover events and service level ratings........................................................................................ 14

How HP selected the set of installed failover events ........................................................................ 15

The set of failover events installed with VCEM 1.10........................................................................ 15

Using HP SIM Action on Events with Failover.....................................................................................15

Configuring HP SIM Action on Events to initiate Failover..................................................................... 16

Using Customized Scripts to initiate Failover...................................................................................... 22

Using a remote system to initiate Failover ............................................................................................. 22

Remote Monitoring and VCEM Profile Failover .................................................................................. 22

Using the Enclosure:Bay CLI ............................................................................................................ 22

Limitations of using a remote system to monitor systems: ..................................................................... 23

Summary .......................................................................................................................................... 23

Summary of content (23 pages)

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VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves Executive summary............................................................................................................................... 2 Getting started with VCEM Profile Failover.............................................................................................. 3 Key components .............................................................................................................................. 3 Profile Failover: an example ............
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Executive summary VCEM Profile Failover provides a way to quickly move a VC Profile from one system to another. Profile Failover may be triggered using the VCEM UI or via the VCEM Failover command line. The Failover command line may also be used in conjunction with Event monitoring to automatically trigger a Failover if a particular event is received for a specific system. VCEM Profile Failover is not Disaster Recovery but rather a fast-recovery tool that can help administrators minimize unplanned downtime.
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Getting started with VCEM Profile Failover This document provides detailed information on how to use the new Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM) Profile Failover (failover) feature and how to initiate failover with HP SIM Automatic Event Handling. VCEM Profile Failover provides a fast method to recover a SAN-boot server that has sustained a critical hardware failure. The process of Profile Failover moves the failed server’s SAN and IP network resources to a spare server.
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Profile Failover: an example A simple example of Profile Failover follows. The infrastructure depicted in Figure 1 includes: • One VC Domain Group with two HP BladeSystem enclosures. • Virtual Connect with Ethernet and SAN interconnects. • (red box) represents a production server blade (left enclosure). • (blue box) represents a spare server blade (right enclosure). • A server profile that contains the MAC and WWN assignments.
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• Power is applied to the spare server. It boots the system drive image that had been running on the production server and the production workload thereby is restarted on the spare server. Initiating Profile Failover VCEM provides two interfaces for initiating failover: via the VCEM Graphical User Interface (UI) and via the VCEM Command Line Interface (CLI). The UI is accessible only to VCEM users.
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Actions performed by the Failover Job The Failover Job performs the following actions. In the text below, “Exit on error” means that if the corresponding step does not complete successfully, the failover job will stop processing and exit. • Locks the VC Domain Group of the source server to other operations in VCEM for the remainder of the job to avoid possible conflicting actions by other users or processes. • Checks that the source server is a ProLiant server blade. Exit on error.
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• Operating errors and system configuration errors. Profile Failover depends on the following: • Failover is applied only to SAN-boot ProLiant c-Class server blades. • Servers are pre-configured to boot from SAN on power-up. • Servers have no dependency on a local drive. • The source server’s system drive image will run on the hardware-firmware configuration of any spare server in the VC Domain Group that is the same model as the source server.
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Important Notes concerning hardware compatibility VCEM Profile Failover is built on the concept of Virtual Connect Domain Groups. These VC Domain Groups ensure that a VC server profile running within them will have access to the same IP and SAN networks, regardless of what VC Domain they are currently running in. However, within any given Virtual Connect Domain Group, the HP BladeSystem servers may not be interchangeable.
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Pre-failover installation and configuration checklist Installation and configuration requirements for Profile Failover depend on which methods of initiation you wish to use. If you wish to use all methods of initiating failover, configuration items 2 through 7 must be implemented. Table 1.
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• Removing the check from the spare box removes the bay’s designation as a spare. Note that assigning or moving a server profile to a bay also removes its spare designation. • Click the “Apply Spares” button. Clicking twice on the “Spare” column head brings the spare bays to the top of the list. Figure 2. Designating spares Initiating Failover manually Profile Failover may be initiated from the Profiles Tab.
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Profile Failover may also be initiated from the Bays Tab. Check a specific bay that is occupied by a profile and then select the Profile Failover button. VCEM Profile Failover may also be initiated using the CLI.
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Initiating Failover using HP SIM Automatic Event Handling This section describes how to configure and use HP SIM’s Automatic Event Handling for notification and to automatically initiate failover. Concepts The following items need to be configured for Automatic Event Handling to initiate failover: • The events that you want to trigger failover are selected. Below HP recommends a set of events for you to consider. You may use these events or select your own.
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• Using the VCEM CLI the custom tool invokes the VCEM failover command and passes either the host name or ip address of the system that posted the failover event. • The host name or ip address is mapped to its enclosure and bay location. • A failover job is started on that enclosure and bay. • The failover job runs as described above.
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When future failure of a component that is operating in a degraded state threatens physical damage to the server or threatens the integrity of its retained data, there is cause to failover the server. Examples are thermal abnormalities and certain CPU and memory error conditions. HP SIM rates conditions that indicate impending failures as “major” events; however for failover, these events also may be considered critical.
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Before relying on event initiated failover, you must be very comfortable that the accuracy of the selected failure detection events will result in acceptable service level ratings, given your local installation, configurations, workloads, service level objectives and operations policies. How HP selected the set of installed failover events The collection of recommended events includes those events HP believes will be consistently useful to customers.
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section reveals how an administrator may take advantage of this functionality to trigger VCEM Profile Failovers. VCEM provides ease-of-use enhancements for administrators to take advantage of this functionality. Included are links to wizards, custom tool enabled CLI’s, and a collection of events that may be customized by administrators. All of these combine to create a form of automated failover in a VCEM environment.
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The link will load the following page into the same frame. From this UI the administrator is presented with a list of the current action on events as well as buttons enabling more actions. To create a new action on event, simply depress the ‘New’ button to initiate the wizard. The first step is to provide a name for the action on event. Select something that has context to the systems this action on event will apply to.
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The second step allows for the selection of events used to trigger the action. This means that if any of these events are received for any of the monitored systems, the action will be triggered. This example action on event will use the VCEM provided collection of events entitled “Profile Failover Trigger Events.” However, an administrator is free to create a collection of events or to choose individual events they prefer to use for Failover initiation.
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To select individual events, choose the second radio button labeled “use event attributes that I will specify.” The wizard will progress to a new page that will allow the administrator to choose events by severity, event category, or even the event type. Choosing the event type will display all of the available SNMP traps which may be used for Failover purposes. A common category is “ProLiant System and Environmental Events” which contains many of the system specific warnings and failures.
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Using the second radio button and selecting next provides the following UI. The administrator can use a number of system attributes to select specific systems. This example will use the system name which in this case is the ip address 170.50.0.69. There are a number of actions available. When one of the previously selected events occurs for the selected systems, all of the actions checked here will be initiated.
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The next step of the wizard is the time filter. The time filter allows an administrator to enable and disable action on events during certain time periods. For example, the administrator may want to enable VCEM Profile Failover during the weekends when they may not be in the office. The final step of the wizard is a review of the action on event. This automatic event handler will be invoked whenever one of the trigger events occurs for the specified system.
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Using Customized Scripts to initiate Failover Administrators may choose to create customized scripts or batch files to initiate Failover. These scripts can be logically constructed to perform tasks prior to a VCEM Profile Failover and after a VCEM Profile Failover. The basic construction of a custom script could be: • • • Pre-Failover Commands.
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An example usage with an enclosure named Databases and a defective server in bay 8 would be: vcem –failover –bay Databases:8 This would initiate a VCEM Profile Failover on the profile associated with bay 8. Limitations of using a remote system to monitor systems: The key to a successful invocation of VCEM Failover from a remote system is accurate data. The system monitoring and data collection system needs to be able to: o Identify that a problem has occurred.