Recover from a VMware Cloud Director Appliance Standby Cell Failure in a High Availability Cluster

If a standby cell of the VMware Cloud Director appliance is not running properly, you can recover from the failure by deploying a new standby cell.

If one of the standby cells is in the Not reachable or Failed state, you can deploy a new cell. To view the state of the cells in the cluster, see View Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance Cluster Health and Failover Mode.

You can use this workflow to reuse the IP addresses and hostname of the failed standby when you deploy a new standby.

1. If possible, use the cell management tool to shut down the VMware Cloud Director process. From the failed standby cell, run the following command.

   /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u <admin username> cell --shutdown

2. Power off the failed standby VM.
3. From any cell other than the failed standby cell, by using the appliance API Unregister method, remove the failed standby cell from the repmgr high availability cluster. See the VMware Cloud Director Appliance API documentation.
4. Use the Service Provider Admin Portal to remove the failed standby appliance from the VMware Cloud Director server group.
   1. From the primary left navigation panel, select Resources, and from the page top navigation bar, select Cloud Resources.
   2. In the secondary left navigation panel, click Cloud Cells.
   3. Select an inactive cell and click Unregister.
5. If you want to reuse the IP address and DNS name of the failed standby cell, you must ensure that the failed standby remains powered off or delete it.
6. Deploy a new standby appliance. You can deploy the appliance by using the vSphere Client or deploy the appliance by using the VMware OVF Tool.

   After deploying the new standby, the cluster health must be Healthy.

7. To reset the cluster failover mode to Automatic, from any cell other than the failed standby cell, use the appliance API Failover method. See the VMware Cloud Director Appliance API documentation.

   For more information about the automatic failover mode, see Automatic Failover of Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance.

8. If the VMware Cloud Director appliance FIPS mode was on before the restore, you must set it again by using the VMware Cloud Director appliance API.

   The cell FIPS mode restores automatically.