High availability fire drill - Ensuring the high availability capabilities of a service group

Last published : Jun 19, 2026
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 the 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.
HA fire drill checks the configuration of all the resources of a service group on each system (in the system list for the service group) where the service group is currently offline to ensure that there are no configuration changes or incorrect configurations that may lead to unsuccessful failovers. If the HA fire drill succeeds, there is a higher probability of a successful failover on the target system; there may be some factors outside Cluster Server control that prevent this. However, if the HA fire drill fails, it is quite likely that the service groups will not come online on that system.
The following procedure describes the configuration of the HA fire drill for a service group named Oracle_SG:
To run the high availability fire drill for Oracle_SG service group
  1. In the Management Server console, go to the Availability perspective and selectManage in the left pane.
  2. Expand the Organization or Uncategorized Clusters to locate the cluster.
  3. Expand the cluster and then the Service groups node to locate theOracle_SG service group.
  4. Right-click on the Oracle_SG service group and selectFire Drill>Run HA Fire Drill.
  5. In the Fire Drill wizard panel, click Next.
  6. In the Schedule wizard panel, do the following:
    • Select Schedule for later.
    • Enter a name for the fire drill schedule and specify the frequency of the fire drill run.
    • Click Next.
  7. In the Summary panel, verify your selections for configuring fire drill for Oracle_SG. Click Finish.
  8. In the Result panel, verify that the HA fire drill for Oracle_SG has been configured successfully.
More Information
Example: Improving the availability and the disaster recovery readiness of a service group through fire drills