Integration Guide for Centralized Control

HA for OVN DB servers using pacemaker

The ovsdb servers can work in either active or backup mode. In backup mode, db server will be connected to an active server and replicate the active servers contents. At all times, the data can be transacted only from the active server. When the active server dies for some reason, entire OVN operations will be stalled.

Pacemaker is a cluster resource manager which can manage a defined set of resource across a set of clustered nodes. Pacemaker manages the resource with the help of the resource agents. One among the resource agent is OCF

OCF is nothing but a shell script which accepts a set of actions and returns an appropriate status code.

With the help of the OCF resource agent ovn/utilities/ovndb-servers.ocf, one can defined a resource for the pacemaker such that pacemaker will always maintain one running active server at any time.

After creating a pacemaker cluster, use the following commands to create one active and multiple backup servers for OVN databases:

$ pcs resource create ovndb_servers ocf:ovn:ovndb-servers \
     master_ip=x.x.x.x \
     ovn_ctl=<path of the ovn-ctl script> \
     op monitor interval="10s" \
     op monitor role=Master interval="15s"
$ pcs resource master ovndb_servers-master ovndb_servers \
    meta notify="true"

The master_ip and ovn_ctl are the parameters that will be used by the OCF script. ovn_ctl is optional, if not given, it assumes a default value of /usr/share/openvswitch/scripts/ovn-ctl. master_ip is the IP address on which the active database server is expected to be listening, the slave node uses it to connect to the master node. You can add the optional parameters ‘nb_master_port’, ‘nb_master_protocol’, ‘sb_master_port’, ‘sb_master_protocol’ to set the protocol and port.

Whenever the active server dies, pacemaker is responsible to promote one of the backup servers to be active. Both ovn-controller and ovn-northd needs the ip-address at which the active server is listening. With pacemaker changing the node at which the active server is run, it is not efficient to instruct all the ovn-controllers and the ovn-northd to listen to the latest active server’s ip-address.

This problem can be solved by two ways:

1. By using a native ocf resource agent ocf:heartbeat:IPaddr2. The IPAddr2 resource agent is just a resource with an ip-address. When we colocate this resource with the active server, pacemaker will enable the active server to be connected with a single ip-address all the time. This is the ip-address that needs to be given as the parameter while creating the ovndb_servers resource.

Use the following command to create the IPAddr2 resource and colocate it with the active server:

$ pcs resource create VirtualIP ocf:heartbeat:IPaddr2 ip=x.x.x.x \
    op monitor interval=30s
$ pcs constraint order promote ovndb_servers-master then VirtualIP
$ pcs constraint colocation add VirtualIP with master ovndb_servers-master \
    score=INFINITY

2. Using load balancer vip ip as a master_ip. In order to use this feature, one needs to use listen_on_master_ip_only to no. Current code for load balancer have been tested to work with tcp protocol and needs to be tested/enchanced for ssl. Using load balancer, standby nodes will not listen on nb and sb db ports so that load balancer will always communicate to the active node and all the traffic will be sent to active node only. Standby will continue to sync using LB VIP IP in this case.

Use the following command to create pcs resource using LB VIP IP:

$ pcs resource create ovndb_servers ocf:ovn:ovndb-servers \
     master_ip="<load_balance_vip_ip>" \
     listen_on_master_ip_only="no" \
     ovn_ctl=<path of the ovn-ctl script> \
     op monitor interval="10s" \
     op monitor role=Master interval="15s"
$ pcs resource master ovndb_servers-master ovndb_servers \
    meta notify="true"