## 7. Doing switchover and failover with Slony-I

### 7.1. Foreword

Slony-I is an asynchronous replication system. Because of that, it is almost certain that at the moment the current origin of a set fails, the final transactions committed at the origin will have not yet propagated to the subscribers. Systems are particularly likely to fail under heavy load; that is one of the corollaries of Murphy's Law. Therefore the principal goal is to prevent the main server from failing. The best way to do that is frequent maintenance.

Opening the case of a running server is not exactly what we should consider a “professional” way to do system maintenance. And interestingly, those users who found it valuable to use replication for backup and failover purposes are the very ones that have the lowest tolerance for terms like “system downtime.” To help support these requirements, Slony-I not only offers failover capabilities, but also the notion of controlled origin transfer.

It is assumed in this document that the reader is familiar with the slonik utility and knows at least how to set up a simple 2 node replication system with Slony-I.

### 7.2. Controlled Switchover

We assume a current “origin” as node1 with one “subscriber” as node2 (e.g. - slave). A web application on a third server is accessing the database on node1. Both databases are up and running and replication is more or less in sync. We do controlled switchover using MOVE SET.

- At the time of this writing switchover to another server requires the application to reconnect to the database. So in order to avoid any complications, we simply shut down the web server. Users who use pg_pool for the applications database connections merely have to shut down the pool.

- A small slonik script executes the following commands:

      lock set (id = 1, origin = 1);
      wait for event (origin = 1, confirmed = 2);
      move set (id = 1, old origin = 1, new origin = 2);
      wait for event (origin = 1, confirmed = 2);

  After these commands, the origin (master role) of data set 1 has been transferred to node2. And it is not simply transferred; it is done in a fashion such that node1 becomes a fully synchronized subscriber, actively replicating the set. So the two nodes have switched roles completely.

- After reconfiguring the web application (or pgpool ) to connect to the database on node2, the web server is restarted and resumes normal operation.

  Done in one shell script, that does the application shutdown, slonik, move config files and startup all together, this entire procedure is likely to take less than 10 seconds.

You may now simply shutdown the server hosting node1 and do whatever is required to maintain the server. When slon node1 is restarted later, it will start replicating again, and soon catch up. At this point the procedure to switch origins is executed again to restore the original configuration.

This is the preferred way to handle things; it runs quickly, under control of the administrators, and there is no need for there to be any loss of data.

### 7.3. Failover

If some more serious problem occurs on the “origin” server, it may be necessary to FAILOVER to a backup server. This is a highly undesirable circumstance, as transactions “committed” on the origin, but not applied to the subscribers, will be lost. You may have reported these transactions as “successful” to outside users. As a result, failover should be considered a last resort. If the “injured” origin server can be brought up to the point where it can limp along long enough to do a controlled switchover, that is greatly preferable.

Slony-I does not provide any automatic detection for failed systems. Abandoning committed transactions is a business decision that cannot be made by a database system. If someone wants to put the commands below into a script executed automatically from the network monitoring system, well ... it's your data, and it's your failover policy.

- The slonik command

      failover (id = 1, backup node = 2);

  causes node2 to assume the ownership (origin) of all sets that have node1 as their current origin. If there should happen to be additional nodes in the Slony-I cluster, all direct subscribers of node1 are instructed that this is happening. Slonik will also query all direct subscribers in order to determine out which node has the highest replication status (e.g. - the latest committed transaction) for each set, and the configuration will be changed in a way that node2 first applies those final before actually allowing write access to the tables.

  In addition, all nodes that subscribed directly to node1 will now use node2 as data provider for the set. This means that after the failover command succeeded, no node in the entire replication setup will receive anything from node1 any more.

- Reconfigure and restart the application (or pgpool) to cause it to reconnect to node2.

- Purge out the abandoned node

  You will find, after the failover, that there are still a full set of references to node 1 in sl_node, as well as in referring tables such as sl_confirm; since data in sl_log_1 is still present, Slony-I cannot immediately purge out the node.

  After the failover is complete and node2 accepts write operations against the tables, remove all remnants of node1's configuration information with the DROP NODE command:

      drop node (id = 1, event node = 2);

  Supposing the failure resulted from some catastrophic failure of the hardware supporting node 1, there might be no “remains” left to look at. If the failure was not “total”, as might be the case if the node had to be abandoned due to a network communications failure, you will find that node 1 still “imagines” itself to be as it was before the failure. See Section 7.5, “After Failover, Reconfiguring node 1” for more details on the implications.

### 7.4. Automating `FAIL OVER`

If you do choose to automate `FAIL OVER` , it is important to do so carefully. You need to have good assurance that the failed node is well and truly failed, and you need to be able to assure that the failed node will not accidentally return into service, thereby allowing there to be two nodes out there able to respond in a “master” role.

When failover occurs, there needs to be a mechanism to forcibly knock the failed node off the network. This could take place via having an SNMP interface that does some combination of the following:

- Turns off power on the failed server.

  If care is not taken, the server may reappear when system administrators power it up.

- Modify firewall rules or other network configuration to drop the failed server's IP address from the network.

  If the server has multiple network interfaces, and therefore multiple IP addresses, this approach allows the “application” addresses to be dropped/deactivated, but leave “administrative” addresses open so that the server would remain accessible to system administrators.

### 7.5. After Failover, Reconfiguring node 1

What happens to the failed node will depend somewhat on the nature of the catastrophe that lead to needing to fail over to another node. If the node had to be abandoned because of physical destruction of its disk storage, there will likely not be anything of interest left. On the other hand, a node might be abandoned due to the failure of a network connection, in which case the former “provider” can appear be functioning perfectly well. Nonetheless, once communications are restored, the fact of the `FAIL OVER` makes it mandatory that the failed node be abandoned.

After the above failover, the data stored on node 1 will rapidly become increasingly out of sync with the rest of the nodes, and must be treated as corrupt. Therefore, the only way to get node 1 back and transfer the origin role back to it is to rebuild it from scratch as a subscriber, let it catch up, and then follow the switchover procedure.

A good reason not to do this automatically is the fact that important updates (from a business perspective) may have been `commit`ted on the failing system. You probably want to analyze the last few transactions that made it into the failed node to see if some of them need to be reapplied on the “live” cluster. For instance, if someone was entering bank deposits affecting customer accounts at the time of failure, you wouldn't want to lose that information.

### Warning

It has been observed that there can be some very confusing results if a node is “failed” due to a persistent network outage as opposed to failure of data storage. In such a scenario, the “failed” node has a database in perfectly fine form; it is just that since it was cut off, it “screams in silence.”

If the network connection is repaired, that node could reappear, and as far as its configuration is concerned, all is well, and it should communicate with the rest of its Slony-I cluster.

In fact, the only confusion taking place is on that node. The other nodes in the cluster are not confused at all; they know that this node is “dead,” and that they should ignore it. But there is not a way to know this by looking at the “failed” node.

This points back to the design point that Slony-I is not a network monitoring tool. You need to have clear methods of communicating to applications and users what database hosts are to be used. If those methods are lacking, adding replication to the mix will worsen the potential for confusion, and failover will be a point at which there is enormous potential for confusion.

If the database is very large, it may take many hours to recover node1 as a functioning Slony-I node; that is another reason to consider failover as an undesirable “final resort.”