You perform cluster and node maintenance procedures to help your VMware Aria Operations perform more efficiently cluster and node maintenance involves activities such as changing the online or offline state of the cluster, fault domains, or individual nodes, activating or deactivating high availability (HA) or continuous availability (CA), reviewing statistics related to the installed adapters, and rebalancing the workload for a better performance.

You perform most VMware Aria Operations cluster and node maintenance using the Cluster Management page in the product interface, or the Cluster Status and Troubleshooting page in the administration interface. The administration interface provides more options than the product interface.

Table 1. Cluster and Node Maintenance Procedures
Procedure Interface Description
Change Cluster Status Administration/Product You can change the status of a node to online or offline.

In a high availability (HA) cluster, taking the primary or replica offline causes VMware Aria Operations to run from the remaining node and for HA status to be degraded.

In continuous availability (CA) cluster, taking the primary or replica offline causes VMware Aria Operations to run in a degraded status.

Note: You cannot convert a High Availability (HA) activated cluster to a Continuous Availability cluster and vice versa. You must first deactivate the cluster availability, so that the cluster becomes a standard cluster and then activate HA or CA as required.

Any manual or system action that restarts the cluster brings all VMware Aria Operations nodes online, including any nodes that you had taken offline.

Activate or Deactivate High Availability Administration

Activating high availability requires the cluster to have at least one data node, with all nodes online or all offline.

To activate high availability, see Adding High Availability to VMware Aria Operations.

Deactivating high availability restarts the VMware Aria Operations cluster.

After you deactivate high availability, the replica node in VMware Aria Operations converts back to a data node and restarts the cluster.

Activate or Deactivate Continuous Availability Administration

Activating continuous availability requires the cluster to have at least one witness node, and at least two data node, with all nodes online or all offline.

To activate continuous availability, see Adding Continuous Availability.

Deactivating continuous availability restarts the VMware Aria Operations cluster.

When you deactivate continuous availability, you can choose to keep all your nodes or cut out one of the fault domains.
  • Click Simply Deactivate with keeping all nodes to keep all your nodes when you deactivate continuous availability.
    Note: You cannot deactivate continuous availability if one of your nodes is faulty. If you want to keep all your nodes, you must fix or replace the faulty node before you proceed.
  • Click Cut-Out one Fault Domain and then select the fault domain you want to keep. The other fault domain and the witness node are deleted.

After you deactivate continuous availability, the replica node in VMware Aria Operations converts back to a data node and restarts the cluster.

Add Nodes Administration

You can add one or more nodes for your cluster.

In a FIPS activated environment, new nodes must be FIPS compliant. In a FIPS deactivated environment, new nodes must be FIPS deactivated.

Activating continuous availability requires one witness node, and an even number of data nodes including the primary node. For example, the cluster must have 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 or 16 nodes.
Replace Nodes Administration You can add nodes and replace them with a downed or non-functional node in a cluster.
Generate Passphrase Administration You can generate a passphrase to use instead of the administrator credentials to add a node to this cluster.

The passphrase is only valid for a single use.

Remove a Node Administration When you remove a node, you lose data that the node had collected unless you are running in high availability (HA) mode. HA protects against the removal or loss of one node.

You must not re-add nodes to VMware Aria Operations that you already removed. If your environment requires more nodes, add new nodes instead.

When you perform maintenance and migration procedures, you should take the node offline, not remove the node.

Configure NTP Product The nodes in VMware Aria Operations cluster synchronize with each other by standardizing on the primary node time or by synchronizing with an external Network Time Protocol (NTP) source.
Rebalance the Cluster Product You can rebalance adapter, disk, memory, or network load across VMware Aria Operations cluster nodes to increase the efficiency of your environment.