Solaris Cluster HA-LDom Agent do not Preserve hostid and MAC Address Upon Failover (Doc ID 1559415.1)

Last updated on MAY 22, 2023

Applies to:

Symptoms

In a configuration running Solaris Cluster with SUNW.ldom failover resources, upon failover of resource group containing an SUNW.ldom resource, the guest LDom associated to the resource will be migrated to another physical host.
The output of "ifconfig -a" will show that the MAC addresses associated to virtual network cards got changed with respect the ones used from the same LDom before the failover.

This can trigger three different potential problems

• for some network features, the network switches identifies hosts by their mac addresses and thus requires that the mac addresses are persistent.
  since the MAC addresses change upon failover, the network switch might not be able to understand that the guest LDom is actually the same host before and after the failover
  
  
• for some applications , licenses are associated to ldomA  and thus requires that hostid is persistent
  since the MAC addresses have a role in the generation of the hostid then the hostid itself can change if the MAC addresses changes upon failover, thus resulting in license issues at application level
  
  
• recent versions of zfs does use hostid to identify the machine that last imported a zpool, and would refuse to import zpool if found to be already used by another host unless forced import is used since the hostid of the guest LDom might be different upon failover, zpool can fail to get imported because the zpool still have a record of the previous hostid of the LDom

Cause