Fencing KVM Virtual Servers

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It's difficult to image a production use-case for clusters built on virtual machines. As a learning and test bed though, clusters of virtual machines can be invaluable.

Clusters of VMs still require fencing, just the same. Generally this is accomplished by using a fence agent that calls the hypervisor and asks it to force the target VM off.

Each hypervisor will have it's own methods for doing this. In this tutorial, we will discuss fencing virtual machines running on the KVM hypervisor using the fence_virtd daemon and the fence_xvm guest fence agent.

Note: This tutorial was based on Clusterlabs.org's "Guest Fencing" tutorial. Thanks to Andrew Beekhof for writing this and helping me sort out some problems I ran into.

Steps

Setting up fencing requires two steps;

1. Configure the host's fence_virtd to listen for fence requests from guests.
2. Configure the guests to talk to the host's daemon using their fence_xvm fence agents.

There is no need for the guest and host operating systems to match. So the specific steps for each of these two steps will vary somewhat depending on which OS you are using.

Host Configuration

This tutorial will use Fedora 18 as the host operating system.

Fedora 18

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Guest Configuration

This tutorial will use Fedora 19 (beta TC5) as the guest VMs.

Fedora 19

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Any questions, feedback, advice, complaints or meanderings are welcome.
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