Replace VM HA Cluster with physical appliances

[#1]

Hi,

One of our customers has two HA clusters running on VMWare (running DNS services and a DHCP Failover Association). Due to some issues in the VMWare environment they want to move these to physical appliances. My initial idea was to;

• take the passive VM nodes oflline and replace them with hardware.
• Let the cluster sync, and check functionality
• do a failover
• replace the other VM with hardware

But doing some research I found that a cluster is either Virtual NIOS, or regular NIOS. Since in a standalone deployment addind a physical appliance can't connect is it was provioned as a vNIOS node.

So I'm wondering if this might work (not if it's supported, because this situation will be operational less than a day).

If this won't work, what are possible low-impact alternatives.

Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

My initial throughts are, you would not be able to achieve the swap without some downtime since, as you already mentioned, we cannot change the member type of an appliance when the HA is online.

So, the process would be pretty straight forward.

1) Shut down the virtual devices (Active and Passive nodes).
2) Once both the virtual nodes are offline, select the HA member and edit the properties to change the member type from vNIOS to Infoblox, Save and Close.
3) On the physical node, change the network configuration settings and make sure it matches the network configuration of the node 1 of the HA pair in GUI.
4) Join the hardware node to the grid using CLI or GUI.

5) Once the hardware node 1 is joined, it will become an active node of the member HA pair.
6) Now repeat steps 3 through 5 to join the second hardware node to the grid which will now be joined as a passive node of the member HA pair.

If you face any unforeseen delay in bringing the hardware appliances online, you could always change the member type back to vNIOS in GUI, power-on the virtual appliances to bring everything back to the previous state.

All these being said, it would also be better to check this with your accounts-rep or Infoblox Support for any inputs from their side as they would be handling such scenarious regularly.  

Regards,

Vishnu Nair

[#3]

Hello Vishnu,

there's some uncertainty about the technical possibility to mix vNIOS with NIOS in a cluster.

We'll test the mixed version in a lab, and if that won't work we'll plan the scenario you described (and which was also suggested by our Infoblox SE).

Thanks

[#4]

Actually, the member type need to be changed to "Infoblox" before we can join physical boxes to replace the existing VMs. Without making this change, the member joining operation will fail. We cant make the needed change when either of the VMs are online as well.

See the last section of this KB:

https://support.infoblox.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4718/kw/hardware%20VM%20swap

"1) Since we cannot change the member type of an appliance when the HA is
online, we need to make both the nodes offline (from grid perspective) which
will allow you to change the member type from Infoblox to vNIOS."

-- this setting need to be change from "vNIOS" to "Infoblox" when moving from VM to Physical

[#5]

Hi jrajan,

I guess I didn't searched that well on the support website. Thanks for the info. It helps a lot.