17.4. Moving resources in a cluster

Pacemaker provides a variety of mechanisms for configuring a resource to move from one node to another and to manually move a resource when needed.

You can manually move resources in a cluster with the pcs resource move and pcs resource relocate commands, as described in Manually moving cluster resources. In addition to these commands, you can also control the behavior of cluster resources by enabling, disabling, and banning resources, as described in Disabling, enabling, and banning cluster resources.

You can configure a resource so that it will move to a new node after a defined number of failures, and you can configure a cluster to move resources when external connectivity is lost.

Moving resources due to failure

When you create a resource, you can configure the resource so that it will move to a new node after a defined number of failures by setting the migration-threshold option for that resource. Once the threshold has been reached, this node will no longer be allowed to run the failed resource until:

The value of migration-threshold is set to INFINITY by default. INFINITY is defined internally as a very large but finite number. A value of 0 disables the migration-threshold feature.

The following example adds a migration threshold of 10 to the resource named dummy_resource, which indicates that the resource will move to a new node after 10 failures.

# pcs resource meta dummy_resource migration-threshold=10

You can add a migration threshold to the defaults for the whole cluster with the following command.

# pcs resource defaults update migration-threshold=10

To determine the resource’s current failure status and limits, use the pcs resource failcount show command.

There are two exceptions to the migration threshold concept; they occur when a resource either fails to start or fails to stop. If the cluster property start-failure-is-fatal is set to true (which is the default), start failures cause the failcount to be set to INFINITY and always cause the resource to move immediately. For information about the start-failure-is-fatal cluster property, see Summary of cluster properties and options.

Stop failures are slightly different and crucial. If a resource fails to stop and STONITH is enabled, then the cluster will fence the node to be able to start the resource elsewhere. If STONITH is not enabled, then the cluster has no way to continue and will not try to start the resource elsewhere, but will try to stop it again after the failure timeout.

Moving resources due to connectivity changes

Setting up the cluster to move resources when external connectivity is lost is a two step process.

The following table describes the properties you can set for a ping resource.

This example procedure creates a ping resource that verifies connectivity to gateway.example.com. In practice, you would verify connectivity to your network gateway/router.