VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves

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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. The CLI is accessible to users and as an API for other software, such as user-developed
scripts and HP SIM Automatic Event Handling.
The highest level of VCEM administrator privilege is needed to initiate failover.
Using the UI, the source server is always identified by its enclosure and bay location.
Using the CLI, the source server may be identified by its enclosure and bay location, by its
hostname or by any of its IP addresses. Full HP SIM server discovery must be running to use
either of the latter two.
Including HP SIM Automatic Event Handling, which provides for actions to directly initiate
failover upon the occurrence of an event, there are three basic operational approaches to
initiating failover:
• The administrator determines that a system needs to failover and initiates failover from the
UI or CLI.
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HP SIM Automatic Event Handling sends an alert to the administrator about a possible
problem. After verifying the problem, the administrator initiates failover via the UI or CLI.
• HP SIM Automatic Event Handling directly initiates failover via the CLI and sends an alert
to the administrator that this action has been taken.
Initiation via HP SIM Automatic Event Handling is discussed below.
Profile Failover internal operations
The same internal actions are performed by VCEM whether failover is initiated by the UI or
the CLI. This section explains what Profile Failover does when invoked.
The VCEM Job Manager
The Job Manager is a VCEM internal resource that executes a series of configuration actions
as a unified process. At most one failover job per VC Domain Group can be in concurrent
execution.
Most of the work of failover is done within the context of the failover job. The progress of a
failover job can be monitored in the UI or using the CLI as described below.
Failover initiation
When failover is initiated through the CLI, the command line is validated and, if used to
identify the source server, the hostname or IP address is translated to its unique enclosure-
bay location.
The failover job is then scheduled. Its job number is returned so the initiator can check its
status.