Fencing

[skit]

Dear community, i do not seem to find any answer.

Fencing is crucial for the cluster config and operation, but also very little documented.
I did configure IPMI-Fencing, it is working (2-3 minutes until VM would come up on the healthy node after node failure).
But there are options in ui and datacenter.cfg that i do not correctly understand.
Those are:
under Datacenter->HA->Fencing is nothing at all, but Fencing seems to be configured.
In datacenter.cfg documentation under fencing referenced fence.cfg - but no documentation so far.
In previous versions of proxmox there was fence_tool that was used to operate on fencing, and fenced service that was possible to configure.
Now i do not seem to find neither one.

Using proxmox 6.1-8 three nodes in cluster.

Am i missing something out and there is completely new cncept?
Or did i just misunderstand some point?
(I did read fencing tutorials from proxmox, yes)

Thank you for clarifying.

 

[dcsapak]

proxmox uses self-fencing (with a watchdog) since 4.0 afair
it is documented here https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-ha-manager.html#ha_manager_fencing

 

[skit]

Need to revive this topic.

SO we got IPMI configured, but it is super slow - takes about 2 minutes until the cluster notices that node is offline.
Cluster is 7 nodes by now.

So 2 minutes is not a cool solution, and as i understand i need hardware fencing to shorten time out.
Now:
fence agents are somewhat outdated, documentation for proxmox is not existent (not that is clear what to do and how - except for general stuff like "fencing is very importent" or "ipmi fencing" - which is not sufficient as i understand it).

We use the latest version with community subscription.

 

[skit]

In general the questions are two, and there they are:

1) How can i decrease the downtime of a VM if the host is down? (Shorten the timeout)
2) What hardware Fencing devices exactly can i use and how - how to use watchdogs i did read - any pointers welcome!