VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves White Paper

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• The production server’s profile is moved from the production bay (red box) to the spare bay
(blue box). After the move, the spare server has the Ethernet and SAN assignments previously held
by the production server.
• The spare server is powered up. It boots the system drive image that had been running on the
production server and the production workload is restarted on the spare server.
Initiating profile failover
VCEM provides both the GUI and the CLI interfaces for initiating failover. The GUI 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 Systems Insight Manager Automatic Event
Handling.
To perform a failover, you must have at least VCEM Limited Group Operator (or higher)
permission for the group where the failover will occur.
Using the GUI, the source server is always identified by its enclosure and bay location.
Using the CLI, the source server can be identified by its enclosure name and bay location,
by its hostname, or by any of its IP addresses. Full Systems Insight Manager server discovery
must be running to identify the source server by either hostname or IP address.
There are three basic operational approaches to initiating failover:
• Initiate failover from the GUI or CLI.
•
Receive an alert about a possible problem from HP SIM Automatic Event Handling. After
verifying the problem, you initiate failover using the GUI or CLI.
• HP SIM Automatic Event Handling automatically initiates failover via the CLI and sends you
an alert that this action has occurred.
Initiation using HP SIM Automatic Event Handling is discussed below. See
Initiating Failover
using HP SIM Automatic Event Handling for more information.
Profile failover internal operations
The same internal actions are performed by VCEM whether failover is initiated by the GUI 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. Only 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 GUI or by using the CLI as described in
Failover
initiation and Actions performed by the failover job 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 into its unique enclosure-
bay location.