5.3

Managing Planned and Unplanned
Outages
49
VMware vFabric Suite 5.3 49
9. Managing Planned and Unplanned Outages
This chapter describes how to manage both planned and unplanned outages of vFabric Web Server.
Subtopics
Managing Planned Outages
Managing Unplanned Outages
Backing Up vFabric Web Server
Managing Planned Outages
In a planned outage, you schedule a time when vFabric Web Server instances will be briefly unavailable so that you can perform
maintenance on the instance, create cold backups, and so on.
1. On the computer on which the vFabric Web Server instances are installed, log in as the root (Unix) or Administrator
(Windows) user and stop all instances. For example, on Unix:
prompt# cd /opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/myserver/bin
prompt# ./httpctl stop
In the preceding example, the vFabric Web Server instance is located in the /opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/
myserver directory.
The stop command forcibly ends all sessions. To specify that you want the Web Server instance to wait until all sessions
end gracefully, use the gracefulstop command:
prompt# ./httpdctl gracefulstop
See Creating and Using vFabric Web Server Instances for additional details, such as Windows instructions.
2. Perform any required maintenance on the instance, such as updating its configuration and creating a cold backup. While the
Web Server instances are stopped, the content deployed to the instances is not available to users.
3. If the Web Server instance is acting as a proxy or load balancer to one or more application server instances, such as tc
Runtime instances, start them if they are not already running.
4. Start the vFabric Web Server instances. For example:
prompt# cd /opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server/myserver/bin
prompt# ./httpctl start
Managing Unplanned Outages
An unplanned outage is one that you do not schedule. Examples include fairly minor outages such as an unexpected power
outage that causes the Web Server computer to shut down ungracefully to more critical outages such as a hard-disk failure.
Typically, if you have fully restored and restarted the computer on which vFabric Web Server is installed, all you need to do
next is start the instances. Check the error.log log file in the INSTANCE-DIR/logs directory to ensure that failures do not
occur during startup and that the configuration files are not corrupted. Invoke your deployed content to verify that you can access
it.
If, however, the log file indicates that the Web Server instance did not start because, for example, the configuration files are
corrupted, or your deployed content does not seem to be working correctly, you should restore the instance directory from a
recent cold backup. The following procedure describes how to do this.