StarWind Maintenance Mode: manage server planned downtime

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Host:
Alexey Khorolets

Duration: 28:03

PUBLISHED/UPDATED: September 20th, 2017

Key points of the webinar:

  • “Maintenance” mode key operation principles
  • Key benefits of StarWind Maintenance Mode
  • Working with “maintenance” mode and demonstrating its functionality
  • How StarWind Maintenance Mode reduces post-servicing downtimes

Even though the maintenance is about resolving problems, it may also be viewed as the source of new ones. Partially, this mindset is caused by the time-consuming period of synchronization resumption after servicing. Furthermore, the system has its high availability and performance degraded over that period because nodes are occupied with synchronization restoring. This scenario can be avoided by setting StarWind servers in the “maintenance” mode. In this state, all clients’ requests are canceled, and the device is kept “pre-synchronized”, thus, eliminating any further synchronization procedures.

The “maintenance” state, by its design, makes synchronization restoring unnecessary. First, when the device is set in this mode, all its connections with clients are cut off. Therefore, data is kept unchanged. Second, the data that was synchronized prior the planned shutdown is considered relevant. This means that it does not need to be synchronized at all. In this way, the feature keeps the nodes “pre-synchronized” and prevents any data changes.

Furthermore, the system has its functioning unaffected by the planned shutdowns. For example, if VMs are running on the servers, they are ready to be started right after the maintenance. The high availability of the system also remains unimpacted because nodes’ underlying storage is not busy with synchronization renewing. The performance also remains unaffected because both nodes are running.