Setting Up a High Availability Pair

About this task

Perform the following steps to set up a High Availability pair.

Procedure

  1. If you are using 9005 appliances to set up an HA pair, do the procedures in Step 1a. If you are using 9004 appliances, do the procedures in Step 1b. .
    Note: High Availability can only be obtained by connecting homogeneous appliances. Do not attempt to connect dissimilar appliances (such as a 9005 appliance and a 9004 appliance) to one another to attain High Availability
    1. For the 9005 appliance - To create an HA pair, you need a total of six Ethernet cables in addition to the recommended serial console cable. Directly connect the replication interfaces of the two appliances with two Ethernet cables:
      1 x ethernet cable for emgmt of Appliance A
      1 x ethernet cable for emgmt of Appliance B
      1 x ethernet cable for edata of Appliance A
      1 x ethernet cable for edata of Appliance B
      1 x ethernet cable for repl1 between Appliance A and Appliance B
      1 x ethernet cable for repl2 between Appliance A and Appliance B
      Connected as follows:
      Appliance 1             Appliance 2
      Repl 1 <--------------> Repl 1
      MGMT 	                MGMT
      Data 1                  Data 1
      Data 2                  Data 2
      Data 3                  Data 3
      Repl 2 <--------------> Repl 2
      Connect MGMT and Data 1 for both appliances to the appropriate management and data networks. Data 2 and Data 3 should remain disconnected.
    2. For the 9004 appliance - Note that the network interfaces labelled externally on the Cast Iron appliance are mapped to different interfaces internally:
      External Label 		Internal designation
      MGMT          		emgmt
      ETH0		        		r1
      ETH2          		edata
      ETH1		        		r2
      Connect the appliances with two Ethernet cables:
      Appliance 1                           Appliance 2
      MGMT   (internal:emgmt)               MGMT (internal:emgmt)
      ETH0   (internal:r1)    ----------->  ETH0 (internal:r1)
      ETH1   (internal:r2)    ----------->  ETH1 (internal:r2)
      ETH2   (internal:edata)               ETH2 (internal:edata)
      MGMT (emgmt) and ETH2 (edata) for both appliances should be connected to the appropriate management and data networks.
  2. Select an appliance to be the initial Active peer. The second appliance will be the Standby peer.
  3. Connect a serial console to the selected Cast Iron appliance. Log in to the Cast Iron command line interface (CLI) on the Active peer appliance as user admin. The default admin password is !n0r1t5@C. You should get a command prompt similar to: none/Standalone>.
  4. Configure the management and data networks to use statically assigned IP addresses. From the CLI, you do this by issuing a net set interface command followed by net restart:
    appliance name/Standalone> net set interface emgmt address <MGMT IP 
    ADDRESS> mask <MGMT NETMASK> bcast <MGMT BROADCAST>
    
    appliance name/Standalone> net set interface edata address <DATA IP 
    ADDRESS> mask <DATA NETMASK> bcast <DATA BROADCAST>
    appliance name/Standalone> net restart
  5. To avoid problems, you should upgrade Cast Iron appliances with the latest software version. The software can be located on the IBM Fix Central website at http://www.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/ and should be downloaded onto a machine that is accessible from the Cast Iron appliance to be upgraded. Upgrade of the Cast Iron software can be done through the Cast Iron Web Management Console (WMC) or alternatively, through commands issued on the command line interface. To check the software level, connect a serial console to the selected Cast Iron appliance, then log in to the Cast Iron command line interface on the Active peer appliance as user admin. By default the admin password is !n0r1t5@C. Issue the following command to check the software level:
    none/standalone>system show version
    If an update is required, issue the update command, providing the ftp location and user credentials required. For example:
    none/standalone>system update cios image from ftp 10.10.17.166 user 
    billbloggs file Downloads/fixcentral/castiron/myciupdate
    The appliance reboots during the upgrade process.
  6. Repeat steps 3 and 5 for the Standby appliance. Because the appliance temporarily requires two IP addresses for the duration of the upgrade, you may also need to perform step 4 on the Standby peer.
    Note: After HA setup is complete, only two IP addresses (one for management and one for data) are required for the HA pair. Any IP addresses used on the Standby peer for this step are discarded upon completion of HA setup and may be used elsewhere in the network environment.
  7. Issue the following command on both peers to ensure that they have the same level of software installed and that it is the required software level:
    none/standalone>system show version
  8. Configure the Active appliance as HA:
    none/standalone> system haconfig enable active
    The appliance reboots and restarts as the Active appliance.
  9. Log in to the Active appliance. The command prompt shows the appliance is active:
    none/Active>
    or
    appliance name/Active>
  10. Connect a serial console to the selected Standby appliance, then log into the Standby peer and issue the following command to configure it as HA:
    none/standalone> system haconfig enable standby 
  11. Log back into the Standby appliance. The command prompt shows the appliance is standby:
    none/Standby>
  12. On the Active appliance check the status of the HA pair:
    appliance name/Active>ha show pairstatus
    The output indicates if the appliances are highly available. For example:
    appliance name/Active>ha show pairstatus
    
    Pair Status
    ----------------
    NOT Highly Available
    Local State: ACTIVE_2
    Peer  State: STANDBY
    Sync Status: 74%
    
    
    Appliance Services
    -------------------
    Network: Up
    Runtime: Starting
    
    Command complete
    
    In this example, the HA pair is not highly available because synchronization of the disks is only 74% complete. Issue the command again and the status changes:
    appliance name/Active>ha show pairstatus
    
    Pair Status
    ----------------
    Highly Available
    Local State: ACTIVE_2
    Peer  State: STANDBY
    Sync Status: Synced
    
    Appliance Services
    -------------------
    Network: Up
    Runtime: Up
    
    Command complete
  13. After synchronization completes, it is important to ensure that the HA pair can properly switch roles when necessary. Use ha show pairstatus to confirm that the pair is Highly Available and that the network and runtime appliance services are reported as up. Identify the serial number of the appliance that is currently active.
    appliance name/Active> system show version
    Issue the following command to switch the roles of the HA pair:
    appliance name/Active> ha switch
    The Standby peer takes over and becomes Active. (Typically this process requires about 2 minutes). The peer that was previously Active becomes Standby. Use the command system show version to view the serial number of the Active appliance and confirm that it has changed. Use the command "ha show pairstatus" to verify that the HA pair returns to the Highly Available state.
  14. After confirming that the HA pair can switch roles in one direction (for example: Peer A -> Peer B), do Step 13 again to ensure the HA pair can switch roles in the other direction (Peer B -> Peer A).
    Note: A note regarding High Availability pairs and Hybrid Cloud Integration (HCI) support – If you are using HCI functionality and attempt to convert two Integration Appliances to HA, the HCI function will no longer be supported.



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Timestamp icon Last updated: Wednesday, December 16, 2015


http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wci/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.wci.HAOverview.doc/HAsetuphapair.html