How to delay the VCS startup after a reboot on RHEL 7.3

Description

This article demonstrates how to delay the VCS (Veritas Cluster Server) startup after a reboot on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 7.3.

For RHEL 7.3 with InfoScale 7.3, or above:

To delay the VCS startup by five minutes, make the necessary changes to the OS-level tunable TimeoutStartSec and ExecStartPre.

TimeoutStartSec: Configures the amount of time to wait for startup. If a daemon does not signal startup completion within the configured time, the service will be considered failed and will be shut down again.

ExecStartPre: The commands which are specified in ExecStartPre will be executed before starting the service.

  
Here is the default value:


# systemctl show vcs.service -p TimeoutStartUSec
TimeoutStartUSec=1min 30s
#

#systemctl show vcs.service -p ExecStartPre
#

Add the entries for TimeoutStartSec and ExecStartPre along with the desired values into the file /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vcs.service.

TimeoutStartSec=300                           
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 180

Use systemctl to reload the units.
#systemctl daemon-reload

In this example, the delay for VCS start is 3 minutes, so we set TimeoutStartSec value to 5 minutes and set the command sleep for 180 seconds in ExecStartPre.


# systemctl show vcs.service -p ExecStartPre
ExecStartPre={ path=/bin/sleep ; argv[]=/bin/sleep 180 ; ignore_errors=no ; start_time=[Wed 2018-02-28 05:22:46 EST] ; stop_time=[Wed 2018-02-28 05:25:46 EST
lines 1-1/1 (END)

#systemctl show vcs.service -p TimeoutStartUSec
TimeoutStartUSec=5min
#


Note: By making these changes, there will be a delay when starting HAD with the command hastart.


#systemctl status vcs.service
? vcs.service - VERITAS Cluster Server (VCS)
  Loaded: loaded (/opt/VRTSvcs/bin/vcs; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Active: activating (start-pre) since Wed 2018-02-28 23:26:52 EST; 1min 18s ago
  Process: 6660 ExecStop=/opt/VRTSvcs/bin/vcs stop 2>&1 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 13148 ExecStart=/opt/VRTSvcs/bin/vcs start 2>&1 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Control: 7068 (sleep)
  CGroup: /system.slice/vcs.service
          ??control
            ??7068 /bin/sleep 180

Feb 28 23:26:52 server101 systemd[1]: Starting VERITAS Cluster Server (VCS)...


For RHEL 7.3 with InfoScale 7.2

VCS is not started by the system in Infoscale 7.2. It uses the legacy init method.

Follow these steps to make the necessary changes to delay the VCS startup for infoscale 7.2

1. Run cp /etc/init.d/vcs /etc/init.d/vcs_bk.

2. Edit the file etc/init.d/vcs and induce sleep:

   186 # See how we were called.
    187 case "$1" in
    188     start)
    189         sleep 300                                   
    190         hastart
    191         ;;
    192     stop)
    193         hastop
    194         ;;


In this example, the delay for VCS start is 5 minutes, so we include the sleep for 300 seconds.

3. Use ystemctl to reload units.
#systemctl daemon-reload

4. Reboot the node and verify the VCS startup
#systemctl status vcs.service


Note: By making these changes, there will be delay when starting HAD.