Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - RHV Virtual Machines as Cluster Members

Contents

• Overview
  • Applicable Environments
  • Recommended Prior Reading
  • Useful References and Guides
  • Introduction
• Policies

Overview

Applicable Environments

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

Recommended Prior Reading

• General conditions with virtualized cluster members

Useful References and Guides

• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters
• Red Hat documentation for Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)

Introduction

This guide offers Red Hat's policies, requirements, and limitations applicable to the use of RHV virtual machines as members of a RHEL High Availability cluster. Users of RHEL High Availability software components should adhere to these policies by installing only on the approved platforms in order to be eligible to receive assistance from Red Hat Support with the appropriate support subscriptions.

Policies

Consider general conditions for support of RHEL High Availability in virtualization environments

• See: General conditions with virtualized cluster members

Supported RHV products/releases with RHEL High Availability:

Any product/release combination not listed here is not supported by Red Hat.

Supported fence methods: See applicable support policies for individual fence methods that may apply to VMware environments. To reference those that are most commonly considered in such environments:

• Support policies - sbd and fence_sbd
  • For guidance in setting up a watchdog device for RHV VMs, see: Presenting a watchdog device to RHV virtual machines to use for sbd fencing
• fence_rhevm
  • For guidance in setting up fence_rhevm STONITH for RHV VMs, see: Configuring RHV-M REST API Power Fencing for RHEL 7 RHV Virtual Machine Cluster Members
• Support policies - fence_scsi / fence_mpath
  • Note: fence_scsi and fence_mpath are only known to be compatible with RHV's virtio-scsi storage emulation mode, or with iSCSI devices accessed directly by VMs without passthrough of RHV layers.

Mixed baremetal and RHV VM clusters: Red Hat does not support clusters consisting of a mix of baremetal and virtual machine members.

RHV Highly Available virtual machines: Red Hat does not support the use of Highly Available RHV VMs as RHEL HA cluster members. The RHEL HA product has not been formally tested in conjunction with the RHV Highly Available VM setting. If you encounter a cluster issue that may be related to the RHV Highly Available setting, Red Hat may require that you reproduce the issue with this setting disabled.

If you believe that you need the RHV Highly Available VM setting, please open a support case so that we can better gauge demand.

For more information on RHV Highly Available virtual machines, refer to the following sections of the RHV Virtual Machine Management Guide.

• 6.15. Improving Uptime with Virtual Machine High Availability Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 | 6.15.1. What is High Availability?
  
• Appendix A. Reference: Settings in Administration Portal and VM Portal Windows Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 | A.1.6. Virtual Machine High Availability Settings Explained