1.3. Fencing Configuration
You must configure a fencing device for each node in the cluster. For information about the fence configuration commands and options, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 High Availability Add-On Reference. For general information on fencing and its importance in a Red Hat High Availability cluster, see Fencing in a Red Hat High Availability Cluster.
Note
When configuring a fencing device, attention should be given to whether that device shares power with any nodes or devices in the cluster. If a node and its fence device do share power, then the cluster may be at risk of being unable to fence that node if the power to it and its fence device should be lost. Such a cluster should either have redundant power supplies for fence devices and nodes, or redundant fence devices that do not share power. Alternative methods of fencing such as SBD or storage fencing may also bring redundancy in the event of isolated power losses.
This example uses the APC power switch with a host name of
zapc.example.com to fence the nodes, and it uses the fence_apc_snmp fencing agent. Because both nodes will be fenced by the same fencing agent, you can configure both fencing devices as a single resource, using the pcmk_host_map and pcmk_host_list options.
You create a fencing device by configuring the device as a
stonith resource with the pcs stonith create command. The following command configures a stonith resource named myapc that uses the fence_apc_snmp fencing agent for nodes z1.example.com and z2.example.com. The pcmk_host_map option maps z1.example.com to port 1, and z2.example.com to port 2. The login value and password for the APC device are both apc. By default, this device will use a monitor interval of sixty seconds for each node.
Note that you can use an IP address when specifying the host name for the nodes.
[root@z1 ~]#pcs stonith create myapc fence_apc_snmp\ipaddr="zapc.example.com" pcmk_host_map="z1.example.com:1;z2.example.com:2"\pcmk_host_check="static-list" pcmk_host_list="z1.example.com,z2.example.com"\login="apc" passwd="apc"
Note
When you create a
fence_apc_snmp stonith device, you may see the following warning message, which you can safely ignore:
Warning: missing required option(s): 'port, action' for resource type: stonith:fence_apc_snmp
The following command displays the parameters of an existing STONITH device.
[root@rh7-1 ~]# pcs stonith show myapc
Resource: myapc (class=stonith type=fence_apc_snmp)
Attributes: ipaddr=zapc.example.com pcmk_host_map=z1.example.com:1;z2.example.com:2 pcmk_host_check=static-list pcmk_host_list=z1.example.com,z2.example.com login=apc passwd=apc
Operations: monitor interval=60s (myapc-monitor-interval-60s)
After configuring your fence device, you should test the device. For information on testing a fence device, see Fencing: Configuring Stonith in the High Availability Add-On Reference.
Note
Do not test your fence device by disabling the network interface, as this will not properly test fencing.
Note
Once fencing is configured and a cluster has been started, a network restart will trigger fencing for the node which restarts the network even when the timeout is not exceeded. For this reason, do not restart the network service while the cluster service is running because it will trigger unintentional fencing on the node.
