Configuring IP failover

This topic describes configuring IP failover for pods and services on your {product-title} cluster.

IP failover manages a pool of Virtual IP (VIP) addresses on a set of nodes. Every VIP in the set is serviced by a node selected from the set. As long a single node is available, the VIPs are served. There is no way to explicitly distribute the VIPs over the nodes, so there can be nodes with no VIPs and other nodes with many VIPs. If there is only one node, all VIPs are on it.

Note	The VIPs must be routable from outside the cluster.

IP failover monitors a port on each VIP to determine whether the port is reachable on the node. If the port is not reachable, the VIP is not assigned to the node. If the port is set to 0, this check is suppressed. The check script does the needed testing.

IP failover uses Keepalived to host a set of externally accessible VIP addresses on a set of hosts. Each VIP is only serviced by a single host at a time. Keepalived uses the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to determine which host, from the set of hosts, services which VIP. If a host becomes unavailable, or if the service that Keepalived is watching does not respond, the VIP is switched to another host from the set. This means a VIP is always serviced as long as a host is available.

When a node running Keepalived passes the check script, the VIP on that node can enter the master state based on its priority and the priority of the current master and as determined by the preemption strategy.

A cluster administrator can provide a script through the OPENSHIFT_HA_NOTIFY_SCRIPT variable, and this script is called whenever the state of the VIP on the node changes. Keepalived uses the master state when it is servicing the VIP, the backup state when another node is servicing the VIP, or in the fault state when the check script fails. The notify script is called with the new state whenever the state changes.

You can create an IP failover deployment configuration on {product-title}. The IP failover deployment configuration specifies the set of VIP addresses, and the set of nodes on which to service them. A cluster can have multiple IP failover deployment configurations, with each managing its own set of unique VIP addresses. Each node in the IP failover configuration runs an IP failover pod, and this pod runs Keepalived.

When using VIPs to access a pod with host networking, the application pod runs on all nodes that are running the IP failover pods. This enables any of the IP failover nodes to become the master and service the VIPs when needed. If application pods are not running on all nodes with IP failover, either some IP failover nodes never service the VIPs or some application pods never receive any traffic. Use the same selector and replication count, for both IP failover and the application pods, to avoid this mismatch.

While using VIPs to access a service, any of the nodes can be in the IP failover set of nodes, since the service is reachable on all nodes, no matter where the application pod is running. Any of the IP failover nodes can become master at any time. The service can either use external IPs and a service port or it can use a NodePort.

When using external IPs in the service definition, the VIPs are set to the external IPs, and the IP failover monitoring port is set to the service port. When using a node port, the port is open on every node in the cluster, and the service load-balances traffic from whatever node currently services the VIP. In this case, the IP failover monitoring port is set to the NodePort in the service definition.

Important

Setting up a NodePort is a privileged operation.

Important

Even though a service VIP is highly available, performance can still be affected. Keepalived makes sure that each of the VIPs is serviced by some node in the configuration, and several VIPs can end up on the same node even when other nodes have none. Strategies that externally load-balance across a set of VIPs can be thwarted when IP failover puts multiple VIPs on the same node.

When you use ingressIP, you can set up IP failover to have the same VIP range as the ingressIP range. You can also disable the monitoring port. In this case, all the VIPs appear on same node in the cluster. Any user can set up a service with an ingressIP and have it highly available.