Hi
I'm currently testing VCSA HA in a lab and I am seeing the following situation.
When I initiate a manual failover everything works fine and the Passive vCenter server becomes the active server and the old active server becomes the passive server. I can also fail back all fine.
However, when I simulate an uncontrolled failure of the active vCenter instance (eg power off the vm) the failover works fine, but the failed vCenter instance fails to rejoin the cluster when powered back up. This has happened every time I have done this.
Is it common for the VCHA cluster to need to be destroyed and recreated after such a failure as I see this is quite a common way to remediate issues?
I'd like to troubleshoot this scenario rather than just to rebuild the cluster each time, but I'm not sure where to look.
If I log into the vCenter server that is failing to rejoin the cluster (the passive node) I can run the Service-Control --status --all command and I notice that not many service are running. Is anyone able to tell me which services should be running on the passive node? In particular should vmware-vcha be running? as when I try to start this it returns the response that the service type is not set to automatic and skips it.
From the VCHA monitoring screen, it shoes me the Active and Witness nodes as 'UP' and the passive as 'DOWN' and suggests I check the passive node is online and accessible over the heartbeat network and I can ping the passive node from the active node all ok using the heartbeat ip address. It then says to check the replication is ok - how do I do this? I can see the vmware-postgres service is running (I had to start this manually) but what more can I do to check the replication is in synch.
Any thoughts would be very much appreciated. I'm most keen to understand what services should be running on the passive as I feel this is going to be the issue.
kind regards