Protect Vmware guest under RedHat Cluster

Most documentation on the net is about how to run a cluster-in-a-box under Vmware. Very few seem to care about protecting Vmware guests under real RedHat cluster with a shared storage.

This article is just about it. While I would not recommend using Vmware in such a setup, it has been the case, and that Vmware guest actually resides on the shared storage. To relocate it is out of the question, so migrating it together with other resources is the only valid option.

To do so, I have created a simple script which will accept start/stop/status arguments. The Vmware guest VMX is hard-coded into the script, but in an easy-to-change format. This script will attempt to freeze the Vmware guest, and only if it fails, to shut it down. Mind you that the blog’s HTML formatting might alter quotation marks into UTF-8 marks which will not be understood well by shell.

#!/bin/bash
# This script will start/stop/status VMware machine
# Written by Ez-Aton
# http://www.tournament.org.il/run

# Hardcoded. Change to match your own settings!
VMWARE="/export/vmware/hosts/Windows_XP_Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx"
VMRUN="/usr/bin/vmrun"
TIMEOUT=60

function status () {
  # This function will return success if the VM is up
  $VMRUN list | grep "$VMWARE" &>/dev/null
  if [[ "$?" -eq "0" ]]
  then
    echo "VM is up"
    return 0
  else
    echo "VM is down"
    return 1
  fi
}

function start () {
  # This function will start the VM
  $VMRUN start "$VMWARE"
  if [[ "$?" -eq "0" ]]
  then
    echo "VM is starting"
    return 0
  else
    echo "VM failed"
    return 1
  fi
}

function stop () {
  # This function will stop the VM
  $VMRUN suspend "$VMWARE"
  for i in `seq 1 $TIMEOUT`
  do
    if status
    then
      echo
    else
      echo "VM Stopped"
      return 0
    fi
    sleep 1
  done
  $VMRUN stop "$VMWARE" soft
}

case "$1" in
start)     start
        ;;
stop)      stop
        ;;
status)   status
        ;;
esac
RET=$?

exit $RET

Since the formatting is killed by the blog, you can find the script here: vmware1

I intend on building a “real” RedHat Cluster agent script, but this should do for the time being.

Enjoy!