About high availability fire drills

Last published : Jul 06, 2026
The high availability (HA) fire drill checks whether the service groups in a cluster are ready to go online on a specific system in the same cluster.
To configure high availability for a database or an application, you may make changes to several infrastructure and configuration settings on multiple systems. To maintain these infrastructure and configuration settings is difficult because cluster environments can be subject to constant change. Administrators often add disks, create new disk groups and volumes, and add new cluster nodes or new NICs to upgrade and maintain the infrastructure. Updating the Cluster Server configuration to match the changing physical configuration and infrastructure is critical. HA fire drills detect discrepancies between the Cluster Server configuration and the underlying physical configuration and infrastructure on a node. Such discrepancies might prevent bringing up a service group online on a specific node. Ultimately, the HA fire drill provides the data that is used to update the HA readiness information on the InfoScale Operations Manager console.
The HA fire drill checks all the resources in a service group and is run on each system (in the system list for the service group) where the service group is offline.
To run an HA fire drill, the service group must be both of the following:
  • Online in the cluster.
  • Composed or partially composed of the resource types that are under the management of the agents that support the HA fire drill. These resources must have VFDs to perform a successful HA fire drill.
You can schedule an HA fire drill on a service group, or manually run it whenever you want.
Note: If the HA fire drill passes, it does not guarantee that the service group will be online on the target system; there may be some factors outside Cluster Server control that prevent it from being online. However, if the HA fire drill fails, it is quite likely that the service groups will not come online on that system.
More Information
Running the high availability fire drill