Recovering a HPVM Guest Quickly on another host without Serviceguard.

[Shawn Zehnder]

Hello,

I'm trying to come up with best solution for recovering an HPVM guest on another host without using Serviceguard. I was able to perform an online migration using HPVM 4.2 hpvmmigrate. However, chances are we would be migrating a guest due to a host outage. I produced some notes below from the MAN pages and will plan on testing them soon. I would like to know if this would be the best way to recover a guest on another host. My notes are below.

Recovering an HPVM Guest

I suggest that we perform the following steps to make sure we can recover a vm guest on a different host.

1.    Run this command for each host outside of the current host.
a.    hpvmmigrate –k –P guest1 –h host2-hpvm-migr
2.    The guests on host2 will need to have this migration step performed to another host.
3.    Perform these steps when changes are made to a guests on the current hosts. Changes may include adding additional storage.
a.    Run hpvmremove –P guest1 to the non-runnable guest on host2
b.    Make the changes to the guest on the source host
c.    Run hpvmmigrate –k –P guest1 –h host2-hpvm-migr
d.    The steps will need to be completed the other way if the guest is on host2

Steps to bring up a host1 guest on host2 in the event of a host1 outage.

1. hpvmmodify -P guest1 -x runnable_status=enabled

2. hpvmstart -P guest1

Lets assume host1 has now recovered.

1. Shutdown guest1 on host2

2. hpvmmodify -P guest1 -x runnable_status=disabled

3. Run hpvmstart -P guest1 on host1

Run hpvmmodify -P guestname -x runnable_status=enabled             To make the guest runable.
Run hpvmmodify -P guestname -x runnable_status=disabled             To make the guest not runable

To move a copy of a vm to another host.

           -k        Creates the virtual machine on the target VM Host and
                     marks it Not Runnable, but does not change the virtual
                     machine on the source VM Host.

[Dave Olker]

Hello Shawn,

Those steps seem reasonable. I haven't tried them myself but "hpvmmigrate -k" is the approach I've always recommended to customers asking about copying a guest configuration between hosts for just such an emergency.

Regards,

Dave