Promoting a Standby Provider

If the Primary Provider is not running properly, you can promote one of the Standby Providers to become the new Primary.

When you promote a Standby Provider to Primary, VMware Data Services Manager:

Promotes the Standby to Primary.
Removes the original Primary Provider from the HA cluster.
Registers the remaining Standby Providers with the new Primary Provider.
Restarts all VMware Data Services Manager services on the new Primary and Standby Provider nodes.
Stops some services on the original Primary node (if accessible).

Promotion is a manual activity. After you determine that you want to failover from the original Primary Provider and have identified the Standby Provider that you want to promote, run the procedure below.

Procedure

Perform the following procedure to manually promote a Standby Provider to Primary:

Log in to the Standby Provider VM using root credentials:
```
user@host$ ssh root@<standby-provider-vm>
```
Run the failover command to promote this Standby to Primary:
```
root@standby-provider-vm$ failover --operation promote
```
Note: Promoting a Standby may take some time.
Examine the log file /var/log/tdm/failover.log to view the progress and the results of the operation. Ensure that all Agents were successfully notified. If notification failed on any Agent, you must manually notify the Agent using the VMware Data Services Manager API.

Notifying an Agent about Provider Failover

If VMware Data Services Manager failed to successfully notify an Agent during failover, you must manually update the Agent's RabbitMQ settings for the Provider by invoking the following Agent Onboarding API endpoint:

PATCH https://<agent-ip-address>/onboarding/api/agent/rabbitmq/endpoints

Request parameters:

{
  "endpoint": "<new-rabbitmq-ip-address>",
  "port": <new-port-number>
}

Next Steps

Consider deploying a new Standby Provider to replace the one that you just promoted to Primary.