Stage 6--Run the Non-functional Tests
Non-functional Success Criteria
As outlined earlier in this guide, the main areas that we find customers look for in non-functional tests are:
• What happens if the master node fails?
• What happens if a slave node fails?
• Can I load data fast enough?
• Can I secure access using Kerberos?
Testing Master Node Failure
By default, a single master node is used to control access to a cluster. If this node fails, the cluster is unavailable.
To protect against this, a standby master node can be configured, which is generally one of the existing slave nodes. This requires the use of a clustered file system that is not HDFS, and also requires the use of the Red Hat Cluster Suite, and hence requires the use of Red Hat OS.
For instructions for setting this up, see the VectorH User Guide.
To test this after it is set up, the simplest way is to reboot the master node without shutting anything down first. This requires root access, but can be achieved as follows:
sudo reboot -now
You should expect to see that connections to VectorH get terminated but, after a short period, client re-connection attempts will succeed and work can resume.
The period of time taken to switch over depends on factors such as whether there are any transactions in flight that need to be rolled back, and the normal startup time of VectorH. Failover of the master node will be detected by the RHCS heartbeat process in approximately a second, and then the startup of VectorH on the standby node will begin.
Testing Slave Node Failure
To achieve any level of automatic recovery if a slave node fails, YARN must be used. By default, YARN is disabled. For details on how to enable YARN, see the VectorH Getting Started guide.
Without YARN, if a slave node fails, the cluster must be manually stopped, re-configured to remove the failed node from the slaves file in $II_SYSTEM/ingres/files, and then re-started.
To simulate the failure of a slave node, the same reboot procedure can be used as for the master node.
Using Active Directory Authentication
The default method of authentication for VectorH is to use database authentication, which means that every user must have an ID created in the database (for example, through CREATE USER or the accessdb tool) to be able to access the system.
If Active Directory authentication needs to be used, then DBMS authentication cannot be used; they are mutually exclusive.