SUSE High Availability Cluster Services – How to stop, start or view the status

This blog post aims to summarize the starting and stopping options available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) High Availability (HA) cluster stack operations. I will offer brief answers to a few questions that have been commonly asked by our customers and partners.

Before We Start:

First, some background information, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) High Availability Extension (HAE) team sets a specific systemd unit parameter StopWhenUnneeded=yes inside the corosync.service systemd unit configurations file /usr/lib/systemd/system/corosync.service.

What this means is only systemctl stop pacemaker command execution will stop the corosync service when corosync service thinks it is no longer needed. A common misconception is that SLES HA cluster operators think they could restart the whole cluster stack on one node using systemctl restart pacemaker command, which is not correct.

Tip

For more information about StopWhenUnneeded=yes parameter explanation, please refer to systemd.unit man page.

Upcoming Change:

The SLE HAE team plans to drop the parameter StopWhenUnneeded=yes from SLE 15 SP2 and the newer releases. SLES HA cluster operators are encouraged to use the Cluster Resource Manager Shell (CRMSH) commands to avoid any confusion.

The following table lists the main SLES HA cluster stack starting and stopping operations using CRMSH commands:

Note

All of the above-mentioned commands in the above table should be executed by an operation user who has the required privileges or by the root user.

Tip

For more info about the above-mentioned crm commands, please refer to crm cluster help help messages.

Cluster Stack Control using systemctlcommand:

Although we at SUSE recommend using CRMSH commands for the SLES HA cluster stack operations, you are still able to use the systemd commands to start, restart and stop SLES HA cluster stack as follows:

Summary: