How to replace a FortiAnalyzer-BigData-VM host

This section contains instructions on how to gracefully remove and replace a malfunctioning virtual machine running as one of the FortiAnalyzer-BigData-VM hosts in an active system. In order to allow the high availability mechanism to take effect, only one host can be decommissioned at a time.

Finding the correct virtual machine instance A virtual machine instance’s host name follows a naming convention: blade-10-0-{chassis ID}-{blade ID}. A host named "blade-10-0-1-3" means that "1" represents the chassis ID and the "3" represents the blade ID. The internal IP of the blade is 10.0.1.3. The chassis ID and blade ID can be viewed in the bootloader menu (see Bootloader). It’s recommended to name the virtual machine instances accordantly during the cluster deployment process.

To replace a host:

1. Connect to the virtual appliance management services. For example, VMware vSphere client web GUI.
2. Select the malfunctioning FortiAnalyzer-BigData-VM instance and power it off.

   For example, in the VMware vSphere client web GUI, select the VM instance and click Action > Power > Power Off.

3. If needed, delete the VM instance from disk to make space for the new instance deployment.
4. Launch a VM instance in the same internal and external networks with the same hardware specifications as other instances in the cluster.

   See Installing FortiAnalyzer-BigData Hosts with VMware vSphere in the FortiAnalyzer-BigData Cluster Deployment on Virtual Machine (VM) guide for more information.

   All VM instances, including the Controller, require identical hardware specification in terms of CPU, RAM, and Disk size in a FortiAnalyzer-BigData-VM cluster.

5. Manually assign the host’s blade ID through bootloader. Set the chassis ID and the blade ID of the replacement host to match the malfunctioning one.

   See Installing FortiAnalyzer-BigData Hosts with VMware vSphere in the FortiAnalyzer-BigData Cluster Deployment on Virtual Machine (VM) guide for more information.

6. Monitor the status of the host from the web remote console. Wait until the host OS completes booting. This may take 5-10 minutes.

   After the host boots up and joins the cluster, it will appear in the GUI in Cluster Manager > Hosts. The new host will have a pending label.

7. In the GUI, go to Cluster Manager > Hosts.
8. Click Assign Role to recover the host.
9. Wait for the Assign job to complete for all services to become healthy.
10. If it appears, follow the Found New recommended configurations notification on the Cluster Manager > Hosts view to apply the optimized configuration for the newly added hosts.
11. (Recommended) To add an extender chassis after scaling out, rebalance the data across the cluster. See How to rebalance the data.