VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves White Paper

The failover job is then scheduled and its job number is returned so you can check the job

status.

Actions performed by the failover job

The failover job performs the following actions.

• Evaluates VC Domain status for any abnormal conditions such as an unmanaged or

unlicensed domains or a domain that has a status of “incompatible”. The failover job then

locks the VC Domain Group of the source server to other operations in VCEM for the

remainder of the job. This prevents possible conflicting actions by other users or processes.

• Checks source server product name (different treatment for ProLiant and Integrity products).

If the product is not identified then the job will exit

• Powers off the source server using press and hold (hard power off).

• Picks a qualified spare server from the source server’s VC Domain Group. If no spare

server is found, then the job will exit. A qualified spare server is defined as the first spare

found that meets the following criteria:

• The spare bay has no assigned profile.

• The spare bay server is physically present.

• The model of the spare server is the same as the model of the source server.

Note: The server model generation is not a differentiator; for example, a BL465-c G1

and a BL465-c G5 are considered to be the same model.

• The spare server is powered off.

• Moves the profile from the source to the spare bay. If errors are encountered during the

move operation, the job will exit. As part of the move operation, VCEM:

• Removes the source server’s host name and IP address information from Systems Insight

Manager.

• Removes the spare designation from the spare bay.

• Powers on the spare server, thereby booting the SAN-attached system drive image. As

part of this operation HP Systems Insight Manager discovery is scheduled to be run on the

spare server in ten minutes. This will associate the host name and IP addresses of the spare

server with HP Systems Insight Manager.

To be effective, the operating system booted on the spare server must have established its

network communications by the time HP Systems Insight Manager discovery runs. If your

system takes longer than 10 minutes to boot due to large disk or memory configurations, you

may need to rerun discovery again once the system has fully completed its boot process

• Completes job by unlocking the resources of the VC Domain Group.

Capabilities and limitations of profile failover

An understanding of the capabilities and limitations of profile failover is helpful to make the

best use of this feature.

When profile failover is complete, the workload of the source (production) server has been

restarted on a different (spare) server blade and the memory resident software and data

have been refreshed from disk. Profile failover can correct the following types of problems:

• Server hardware malfunctions which can be fixed by replacing server hardware.