Creating a Heartbeat That Uses a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in

You can create a custom heartbeat plug-in and configure an existing default heartbeat or a new custom heartbeat to use this custom heartbeat plug-in.

Custom heartbeats are provided for special circumstances and require careful configuration. Consult your Oracle specialist for assistance if your system requires the use of custom heartbeats.

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Caution - The presence of a custom heartbeat prevents the default heartbeat from being used during partnership creation. If you want to use the default heartbeat for your partnership, you must delete the custom heartbeat before running the geops create command.

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This section contains the following information:

• Creating a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in

• How to Add a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in to an Existing Default Heartbeat

• How to Create a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in and Add It to a Custom Heartbeat

Creating a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in

When a heartbeat is created, your custom heartbeat plug-in is passed the following arguments by the Geographic Edition software:

queryinterval

The value of the Query-interval property, which defines the delay in seconds after which a heartbeat status request is declared a failure.

mode

The mode for the plug-in startup, either Normal or Emergency.

pluginpropertyvalues

The value of the Plugin-properties property that is configured for the heartbeat plug-in, if any.

For more information about the properties you can set, see Appendix A, Standard Geographic Edition Properties.

Your custom heartbeat plug-in is expected to check the heartbeat on the secondary cluster and return one of the following exit values:

• Zero, if successful – Indicates that the secondary cluster is alive

• Nonzero, on failure – Indicates that the secondary cluster did not respond to the heartbeat check

How to Add a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in to an Existing Default Heartbeat

1. Log in to a node in the primary cluster.

   You must be assigned the Geo Management RBAC rights profile to complete this procedure. For more information about RBAC, see Geographic Edition Software and RBAC.

2. Add the custom heartbeat plug-in to the default heartbeat.

   # geohb add-plugin -p propertysetting [-p...] \
   pluginname hb_localclustername-remoteclustername

   -p propertysetting

   Specifies the properties of the heartbeat plug-in by using a name=statement pair.

   Specify the path to your custom heartbeat plug-in by using the Query_cmd property.

   For more information about the properties you can set, see Appendix A, Standard Geographic Edition Properties.

   pluginname

   Specifies the name of the custom heartbeat plug-in.

   hb_localclustername-remoteclustername

   Specifies the name of the default heartbeat to which you want to add the custom heartbeat plug-in.

3. Verify that your changes were made correctly.

   # geoadm status

4. Repeat the previous steps on a node of the secondary cluster.

Example 6-8 Adding a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in to the Default Heartbeat

This example adds the custom heartbeat plug-in, command1, to the default heartbeat, hb_cluster-paris~cluster-newyork.

# geohb add-plugin -p query_cmd=/usr/bin/hb command1 \
hb_cluster-paris~cluster-newyork
# geoadm status

How to Create a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in and Add It to a Custom Heartbeat

1. Log in to a cluster node.

   You must be assigned the Geo Management RBAC rights profile to complete this procedure. For more information about RBAC, see Geographic Edition Software and RBAC.

2. Create the new custom heartbeat.

   # geohb create -r remoteclustername \
   [-p propertysetting [-p…]] heartbeatname

   -r remoteclustername

   Specifies the name of the remote, secondary partner cluster.

   -p propertysetting

   Specifies the default properties of the heartbeat.

   A heartbeat property is assigned a value by a name=statement pair.

   For more information about the properties you can set, see Appendix A, Standard Geographic Edition Properties.

   heartbeatname

   Specifies an identifier for the heartbeat settings.

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   Caution - The name of the custom heartbeat on each cluster in the same partnership must be different. Choose a name that uniquely identifies the heartbeat, such as paris-to-newyork on the cluster cluster-paris and newyork-to-paris on cluster cluster-newyork.

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   For more information about the geohb command, refer to the geohb(1M) man page.

3. Add the custom heartbeat plug-in to the heartbeat.

   # geohb add-plugin -p propertysetting [-p…] \
   pluginname heartbeatname

   -p propertysetting

   Specifies the properties of the heartbeat plug-in by using a name=statement pair.

   Specify the path to your custom heartbeat plug-in by using the Query_cmd property.

   For more information about the properties you can set, see Appendix A, Standard Geographic Edition Properties.

   pluginname

   Specifies the name of the custom heartbeat plug-in.

   heartbeatname

   Specifies an identifier for the heartbeat.

4. Create the partnership that will use the heartbeat that you created in the previous step.

   # geops create -c remoteclustername -h heartbeatname \
   [-p propertysetting [-p…]] partnershipname

   -c remoteclustername

   Specifies the name of remote cluster that will participate in the partnership.

   This name matches the logical hostname used by the Geographic Edition infrastructure on the remote cluster.

   -h heartbeatname

   Specifies the custom heartbeat to be used in the partnership to monitor the availability of the partner cluster.

   -p propertysetting

   Sets the value of partnership properties with a string of name=value pair statements.

   For more information about the properties you can set, see Appendix A, Standard Geographic Edition Properties.

   partnershipname

   Specifies the name of the partnership.

   For more information about using geops create command to create a partnership, see How to Create a Partnership.

5. Verify that your changes were made correctly.

   # geoadm status

Example 6-9 Adding a Custom Heartbeat Plug-in to a New Custom Heartbeat

This example creates the heartbeat paris-to-newyork, which uses a custom heartbeat plug-in, and associates the heartbeat with a new partnership.

# geohb create -r cluster-newyork paris-to-newyork
# geohb add-plugin -p query_cmd=/usr/bin/hb/ command1 paris-to-newyork
# geops create -c cluster-newyork -h paris-to-newyork paris-newyork-ps
# geoadm status