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Primary and Secondary nodes, pick one!

Duncan Epping · Aug 7, 2009 ·

I get this question at least once every two weeks; Is it possible to handpick a primary node? Until now the answer has always been; No, this is not possible. But is this really the case? Can’t I manually promote a server to primary or demote a server to secondary? Those who have been paying attention might have noticed there’s a way to actually list the current primaries and secondaries from the HA command-line interface.

/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli (ftcli on earlier versions)
AAM> ln

Now that makes you wonder what else is possible… Lets start with a warning. I don’t know if this is supported. Lets assume it is not. Also keep in mind that the supported limit of primaries is 5, I repeat 5. This is a soft limit, so you can manually add a 6th, but this is not supported. Now here’s the magic…

To promote a node:

/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli (ftcli on earlier versions)
AAM> promotenode <nodename>

To demote a node:

/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli (ftcli on earlier versions)
AAM> demotenode <nodename>

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Comments

  1. NiTRo says

    9 August, 2009 at 23:25

    Hi Duncan,
    In this case, the 6th node will be really considered as primary by others ?

  2. Duncan says

    10 August, 2009 at 05:29

    yes it will…

  3. NiTRo says

    10 August, 2009 at 17:20

    i just test on a big cluster, no more than 6 primary allowed, the others are shuted down

  4. NiTRo says

    10 August, 2009 at 17:42

    http://x505.free.fr/img/aam-shutdown.jpg

  5. Abhilash says

    31 March, 2011 at 16:36

    Duncan,

    Does manually promoting a host remain a static setting ?

    Lets consider a scenario where-in we have 11 hosts spread across 2 sites(Site A and Site B)

    Site A : 8 hosts
    Site B : 3 Hosts

    All the current primaries are at Site A. So as expected if the chassis at Site A looses power, then HA wouldn’t restart the VMs since all the primaries are down.

    I am trying to find a way to workaround this problem.

    I could think of demoting two primaries at Site A and promoting two secondaries at Site B. But what if we were to do some maintenance in the cluster, will HA re-elect the 2 nodes at site B as primaries ?

    Thanks,
    Abhilash

  6. Cornelia Krewson says

    23 June, 2012 at 21:23

    Hiya, I am really glad I have found this information. Nowadays bloggers publish just about gossips and internet and this is really annoying. A good website with exciting content, that’s what I need. Thank you for keeping this site, I will be visiting it. Do you do newsletters? Can’t find it.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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