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Aaron Prisk edited this page Apr 30, 2021 · 8 revisions

Welcome to the SIF wiki!

Last Updated 4/30/2021

Here you can find additional information about the SIF Project such as best practices, current features and future roadmaps. Be sure to check out the FAQ page for commonly asked questions!

SIF Features

  • Simple installation script and configuration.
  • Automatic VM failover and migration in host failure scenario.
  • Automatic live migration after host restoration.
  • SystemD service for starting, stopping and managing SIF Watcher.
  • Logging of failover and important events.
  • Automatic nightly XML dumps.
  • Manual/Planned failover function.

Best Practices

  • Disk Caching - Setting your VM's disk caching method to "none" is recommended. VMs with disk caching enabled will fail to live migrate back to source host due to a virsh limitation. This can be bypassed by passing --unsafe option in sif-failover, however this risks data corruption.

  • NFS Version - While most modern versions of NFS will work as a shared storage method, version 4.0 and above is recommended with SIF. There is a well known bug with version 3.0 that will lock a crashed host's VMs and prevent proper failover.

  • Hostnames and DNS - Live migrations require resolvable hostname for each host in the pair. This can be achieved via a DNS server or by adding entries into the /etc/hosts file for each server. EX:

192.168.1.10    host1
192.168.1.11    host2

What's Coming Next

  • Additional pre-flight checks in failover scenarios.
  • Email Alerting

Video Introduction

Check out a short video introduction to how SIF works and a live demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FKv2uxg7K8

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