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About node maintenance

Understanding node maintenance mode

Nodes can be placed into maintenance mode using the oc adm utility, or using NodeMaintenance custom resources (CRs).

Placing a node into maintenance marks the node as unschedulable and drains all the virtual machines and pods from it. Virtual machine instances that have a LiveMigrate eviction strategy are live migrated to another node without loss of service. This eviction strategy is configured by default in virtual machine created from common templates but must be configured manually for custom virtual machines.

Virtual machine instances without an eviction strategy are shut down. Virtual machines with a RunStrategy of Running or RerunOnFailure are recreated on another node. Virtual machines with a RunStrategy of Manual are not automatically restarted.

Virtual machines must have a persistent volume claim (PVC) with a shared ReadWriteMany (RWX) access mode to be live migrated.

When installed as part of OpenShift Virtualization, Node Maintenance Operator watches for new or deleted NodeMaintenance CRs. When a new NodeMaintenance CR is detected, no new workloads are scheduled and the node is cordoned off from the rest of the cluster. All pods that can be evicted are evicted from the node. When a NodeMaintenance CR is deleted, the node that is referenced in the CR is made available for new workloads.

Using a NodeMaintenance CR for node maintenance tasks achieves the same results as the oc adm cordon and oc adm drain commands using standard OpenShift Container Platform custom resource processing.

Maintaining bare metal nodes

When you deploy OpenShift Container Platform on bare metal infrastructure, there are additional considerations that must be taken into account compared to deploying on cloud infrastructure. Unlike in cloud environments where the cluster nodes are considered ephemeral, re-provisioning a bare metal node requires significantly more time and effort for maintenance tasks.

When a bare metal node fails, for example, if a fatal kernel error happens or a NIC card hardware failure occurs, workloads on the failed node need to be restarted elsewhere else on the cluster while the problem node is repaired or replaced. Node maintenance mode allows cluster administrators to gracefully power down nodes, moving workloads to other parts of the cluster and ensuring workloads do not get interrupted. Detailed progress and node status details are provided during maintenance.

Additional resources: