5. Configure Fencing¶
5.1. What is Fencing?¶
Fencing protects your data from being corrupted, and your application from becoming unavailable, due to unintended concurrent access by rogue nodes.
Just because a node is unresponsive doesn’t mean it has stopped accessing your data. The only way to be 100% sure that your data is safe, is to use fencing to ensure that the node is truly offline before allowing the data to be accessed from another node.
Fencing also has a role to play in the event that a clustered service cannot be stopped. In this case, the cluster uses fencing to force the whole node offline, thereby making it safe to start the service elsewhere.
Fencing is also known as STONITH, an acronym for “Shoot The Other Node In The Head”, since the most popular form of fencing is cutting a host’s power.
In order to guarantee the safety of your data [1], fencing is enabled by default.
Note
It is possible to tell the cluster not to use fencing, by setting the
stonith-enabled
cluster property to false:
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs property set stonith-enabled=false
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs cluster verify --full
However, this is completely inappropriate for a production cluster. It tells the cluster to simply pretend that failed nodes are safely powered off. Some vendors will refuse to support clusters that have fencing disabled. Even disabling it for a test cluster means you won’t be able to test real failure scenarios.
5.2. Choose a Fence Device¶
The two broad categories of fence device are power fencing, which cuts off power to the target, and fabric fencing, which cuts off the target’s access to some critical resource, such as a shared disk or access to the local network.
Power fencing devices include:
- Intelligent power switches
- IPMI
- Hardware watchdog device (alone, or in combination with shared storage used as a “poison pill” mechanism)
Fabric fencing devices include:
- Shared storage that can be cut off for a target host by another host (for example, an external storage device that supports SCSI-3 persistent reservations)
- Intelligent network switches
Using IPMI as a power fencing device may seem like a good choice. However, if the IPMI shares power and/or network access with the host (such as most onboard IPMI controllers), a power or network failure will cause both the host and its fencing device to fail. The cluster will be unable to recover, and must stop all resources to avoid a possible split-brain situation.
Likewise, any device that relies on the machine being active (such as
SSH-based “devices” sometimes used during testing) is inappropriate,
because fencing will be required when the node is completely unresponsive.
(Fence agents like fence_ilo_ssh
, which connects via SSH to an HP iLO but
not to the cluster node, are fine.)
5.3. Configure the Cluster for Fencing¶
Install the fence agent(s). To see what packages are available, run
dnf search fence-
. Be sure to install the package(s) on all cluster nodes.Configure the fence device itself to be able to fence your nodes and accept fencing requests. This includes any necessary configuration on the device and on the nodes, and any firewall or SELinux changes needed. Test the communication between the device and your nodes.
Find the name of the correct fence agent:
pcs stonith list
Find the parameters associated with the device:
pcs stonith describe <AGENT_NAME>
Create a local copy of the CIB:
pcs cluster cib stonith_cfg
Create the fencing resource:
pcs -f stonith_cfg stonith create <STONITH_ID> <STONITH_DEVICE_TYPE> [STONITH_DEVICE_OPTIONS]
Any flags that do not take arguments, such as
--ssl
, should be passed asssl=1
.Ensure fencing is enabled in the cluster:
pcs -f stonith_cfg property set stonith-enabled=true
If the device does not know how to fence nodes based on their cluster node name, you may also need to set the special
pcmk_host_map
parameter. Seeman pacemaker-fenced
for details.If the device does not support the
list
command, you may also need to set the specialpcmk_host_list
and/orpcmk_host_check
parameters. Seeman pacemaker-fenced
for details.If the device does not expect the target to be specified with the
port
parameter, you may also need to set the specialpcmk_host_argument
parameter. Seeman pacemaker-fenced
for details.Commit the new configuration:
pcs cluster cib-push stonith_cfg
Once the fence device resource is running, test it (you might want to stop the cluster on that machine first):
pcs stonith fence <NODENAME>
5.4. Example¶
For this example, assume we have a chassis containing four nodes
and a separately powered IPMI device active on 10.0.0.1
. Following the steps
above would go something like this:
Step 1: Install the fence-agents-ipmilan
package on both nodes.
Step 2: Configure the IP address, authentication credentials, etc. in the IPMI device itself.
Step 3: Choose the fence_ipmilan
STONITH agent.
Step 4: Obtain the agent’s possible parameters:
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs stonith describe fence_ipmilan
fence_ipmilan - Fence agent for IPMI
fence_ipmilan is an I/O Fencing agentwhich can be used with machines controlled by IPMI.This agent calls support software ipmitool (http://ipmitool.sf.net/). WARNING! This fence agent might report success before the node is powered off. You should use -m/method onoff if your fence device works correctly with that option.
Stonith options:
auth: IPMI Lan Auth type.
cipher: Ciphersuite to use (same as ipmitool -C parameter)
hexadecimal_kg: Hexadecimal-encoded Kg key for IPMIv2 authentication
ip: IP address or hostname of fencing device
ipport: TCP/UDP port to use for connection with device
lanplus: Use Lanplus to improve security of connection
method: Method to fence
password: Login password or passphrase
password_script: Script to run to retrieve password
plug: IP address or hostname of fencing device (together with --port-as-ip)
privlvl: Privilege level on IPMI device
target: Bridge IPMI requests to the remote target address
username: Login name
quiet: Disable logging to stderr. Does not affect --verbose or --debug-file or logging to syslog.
verbose: Verbose mode. Multiple -v flags can be stacked on the command line (e.g., -vvv) to increase verbosity.
verbose_level: Level of debugging detail in output. Defaults to the number of --verbose flags specified on the command line, or to 1 if verbose=1 in a stonith device configuration (i.e., on stdin).
debug_file: Write debug information to given file
delay: Wait X seconds before fencing is started
disable_timeout: Disable timeout (true/false) (default: true when run from Pacemaker 2.0+)
ipmitool_path: Path to ipmitool binary
login_timeout: Wait X seconds for cmd prompt after login
port_as_ip: Make "port/plug" to be an alias to IP address
power_timeout: Test X seconds for status change after ON/OFF
power_wait: Wait X seconds after issuing ON/OFF
shell_timeout: Wait X seconds for cmd prompt after issuing command
stonith_status_sleep: Sleep X seconds between status calls during a STONITH action
ipmitool_timeout: Timeout (sec) for IPMI operation
retry_on: Count of attempts to retry power on
use_sudo: Use sudo (without password) when calling 3rd party software
sudo_path: Path to sudo binary
pcmk_host_map: A mapping of host names to ports numbers for devices that do not support host names. Eg. node1:1;node2:2,3 would tell the cluster to use port 1 for node1 and ports 2 and 3 for node2
pcmk_host_list: A list of machines controlled by this device (Optional unless pcmk_host_check=static-list).
pcmk_host_check: How to determine which machines are controlled by the device. Allowed values: dynamic-list (query the device via the 'list' command), static-list (check the pcmk_host_list attribute), status
(query the device via the 'status' command), none (assume every device can fence every machine)
pcmk_delay_max: Enable a delay of no more than the time specified before executing fencing actions. Pacemaker derives the overall delay by taking the value of pcmk_delay_base and adding a random delay value
such that the sum is kept below this maximum. This prevents double fencing when using slow devices such as sbd. Use this to enable a random delay for fencing actions. The overall delay is
derived from this random delay value adding a static delay so that the sum is kept below the maximum delay.
pcmk_delay_base: Enable a base delay for fencing actions and specify base delay value. This enables a static delay for fencing actions, which can help avoid "death matches" where two nodes try to fence each
other at the same time. If pcmk_delay_max is also used, a random delay will be added such that the total delay is kept below that value. This can be set to a single time value to apply to any
node targeted by this device (useful if a separate device is configured for each target), or to a node map (for example, "node1:1s;node2:5") to set a different value per target.
pcmk_action_limit: The maximum number of actions can be performed in parallel on this device Cluster property concurrent-fencing=true needs to be configured first. Then use this to specify the maximum number
of actions can be performed in parallel on this device. -1 is unlimited.
Default operations:
monitor: interval=60s
Step 5: pcs cluster cib stonith_cfg
Step 6: Here are example parameters for creating our fence device resource:
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs -f stonith_cfg stonith create ipmi-fencing fence_ipmilan \
pcmk_host_list="pcmk-1 pcmk-2" ipaddr=10.0.0.1 login=testuser \
passwd=acd123 op monitor interval=60s
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs -f stonith_cfg stonith
* ipmi-fencing (stonith:fence_ipmilan): Stopped
Steps 7-10: Enable fencing in the cluster:
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs -f stonith_cfg property set stonith-enabled=true
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs -f stonith_cfg property
Cluster Properties:
cluster-infrastructure: corosync
cluster-name: mycluster
dc-version: 2.0.5-4.el8-ba59be7122
have-watchdog: false
stonith-enabled: true
Step 11: pcs cluster cib-push stonith_cfg --config
Step 12: Test:
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs cluster stop pcmk-2
[root@pcmk-1 ~]# pcs stonith fence pcmk-2
After a successful test, login to any rebooted nodes, and start the cluster
(with pcs cluster start
).
[1] | If the data is corrupt, there is little point in continuing to make it available. |