Global cluster options control how the cluster behaves when confronted with certain situations. They are grouped into sets and can be viewed and modified with the cluster management tools like Pacemaker GUI and the crm shell. The predefined values can be kept in most cases. However, to make key functions of your cluster work correctly, you need to adjust the following parameters after basic cluster setup:
Learn how to adjust those parameters with the GUI in Modifying Global Cluster Options. If you prefer the command line approach, see Section 6.2, Configuring Global Cluster Options.
This global option defines what to do when the cluster does not have quorum (no majority of nodes is part of the partition).
Allowed values are:
The quorum state does not influence the cluster behavior at all, resource management is continued.
This setting is useful for the following scenarios:
Two-node clusters: Since a single node failure would always result in a loss of majority, usually you want the cluster to carry on regardless. Resource integrity is ensured using fencing, which also prevents split-brain scenarios.
Resource-driven clusters: For local clusters with redundant communication channels, a split-brain scenario only has a certain probability. Thus, a loss of communication with a node most likely indicates that the node has crashed, and that the surviving nodes should recover and start serving the resources again.
If no-quorum-policy is set to ignore, a 4-node cluster can sustain concurrent failure of three nodes before service is lost, whereas with the other settings, it would lose quorum after concurrent failure of two nodes.
If quorum is lost, the cluster freezes. Resource management is continued: running resources are not stopped (but possibly restarted in response to monitor events), but no further resources are started within the affected partition.
This setting is recommended for clusters where certain resources depend on communication with other nodes (for example, OCFS2 mounts). In this case, the default setting no-quorum-policy=stop is not useful, as it would lead to the following scenario: Stopping those resources would not be possible while the peer nodes are unreachable. Instead, an attempt to stop them would eventually time out and cause a stop failure, triggering escalated recovery and fencing.
If quorum is lost, all resources in the affected cluster partition are stopped in an orderly fashion.
Fence all nodes in the affected cluster partition.
This global option defines if to apply fencing, allowing STONITH devices to shoot failed nodes and nodes with resources that cannot be stopped. By default, this global option is set to true, because for normal cluster operation it is necessary to use STONITH devices. According to the default value, the cluster will refuse to start any resources if no STONITH resources have been defined.
If you need to disable fencing for any reasons, set stonith-enabled to false.
For an overview of all global cluster options and their default values, see Pacemaker 1.0—Configuration Explained, available from http://clusterlabs.org/wiki/Documentation. Refer to section Available Cluster Options.