Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - General Conditions with Virtualized Cluster Members

Contents

• Overview
  • Applicable Environments
  • Useful References and Guides
  • Introduction
• Policies

Overview

Applicable Environments

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the High Availability Add-On
• Using a virtualization solution to provide VMs that may serve as cluster members

Useful References and Guides

• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters

Introduction

This guide offers Red Hat's general policies, requirements, and conditions applicable to the use of virtual machines (VMs) from any of various virtualization solutions in conjunction with the RHEL High Availability components. Users of RHEL High Availability software components should adhere to these policies in order to be eligible to receive support from Red Hat with the appropriate product support subscriptions. Other policies may exist for specific virtualization products or platforms, so please consult the above-referenced link for RHEL High Availability Support Policies.

Policies

Supported virtualization platforms for RHEL High Availability members: Red Hat offers specific policies covering various individual architectures, platforms, and virtualization products in its collection of support policies. Those policy guides cover the conditions and limitations around Red Hat's support of those specific environments. Any virtualization products or platforms that are not listed in Red Hat's overall set of policies are not supported by Red Hat.

• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters

No support for live migration of active cluster nodes: Red Hat does not provide support for concerns or behaviors arising out of situations in which a node is or may have been live migrated across hypervisors or hosts. RHEL High Availability has certain realtime processing requirements that may be disrupted through the act of migrating a VM, and Red Hat recommends against performing such activity on a VM that is an active cluster member. If any concerning behavior is or may be resulting from live migrations, Red Hat Support may request that such migrations be prevented or disabled in order to further investigate or resolve the behavior.

• Is live migration supported for VMs that are members of a RHEL cluster?

No support for upgrading virtualization platforms / hypervisors while VMs are active: Red Hat does not provide support for situations involving performing an upgrade of the software, firmware, or other components of a virtualization platform or hypervisor while VMs on that platform are active in a cluster. Problems arising in such scenarios must be reproduced outside of the upgrade context in order to receive support from Red Hat.

Mixing different hypervisor technologies among cluster nodes is not supported: Red Hat does not support High Availability deployments consisting of members spread across different virtualization technologies. Support by Red Hat for an individual platform or product is limited to clusters utilizing only a single virtualization technology.