APIC-EM 3 servers cluster

[arikgelman]

Hi,

I have a question regarding APIC-EM cluster.

I am running APIC-EM on 3 servers cluster, If I will shutdown two of the servers, Will the system work on one server?

Thanks,

Arik

[aradford · Accepted solution]

no.  due to "split brain" concerns.  This is a standard practise with clustering.  You always need more than N/2 members to be active.

[cchitnis]

I doubt that. In multi-host environment, different services might be running on different servers (underlying hosts). If you shut the host off, corresponding services running on it would go down as well. If at the granularity of services, if you're ok shutting down certain services, you can do so using controllerDevelopment management page, instead of shutting down the host/s altogether. For certain apps (e.g. iWAN), you may not be aware of other infra level services it depends on; and if some of those are running on server/s you are planning on shutting down, I'd advise against it for the app to function :-)

[aradford]

We have documented this:

Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module Deployment Guide, Release 1.3.x - Cisco APIC-EM M…

A multi-host cluster comprised of 3 hosts is able to tolerate the loss of one of the hosts and supports a single fail-over (although with only two hosts, there is only software high availability, but no hardware high availability).

Note

If a second host also fails in the three host cluster, the remaining host in the cluster will become inoperable and the cluster will go down. Therefore, in the event of the loss of one of the hosts, we recommend that you remove this host from the cluster using the configuration wizard and then either repair and rejoin this host to the cluster or join a new host to the cluster.