How to repair a Solarwinds High Availability pool

Solarwinds High Availability (HA) pools give you the ability to add resiliency into your polling network. However, sometimes both members of an HA pool can be stuck in the standby role, which will prevent any polling to any node that is assigned to this pool. This tutorial will help you get your poller pool back to a working state without having to delete the pool and recreate it.

NOTE: Part of this tutorial includes editing your registry, please be sure to backup your registry or your system (via VMware snapshot or full system backup).

HA roles are stored in the Solarwinds database and in two registry keys on the poller. When the poller is set to Standby, the services are all disabled except for the Solarwinds Administrative service, Solarwinds High Availability service, and in the case of a Main poller pool, the Solarwinds NetPerfMon website.

The two registry keys are located at HKLM>Software>WOW6432Node>Solarwinds>HighAvailibity, and are labeled, InstallType and RunType. The keys can be set to the following states depending on the role that is installed on the poller.

For Main Pollers:

  • InstallType: MainPoller Or MainPollerStandby
  • RunType: MainPoller Or MainPollerStandby

For Additional Pollers:

  • InstallType: AdditionalPoller Or AdditionalPollerStandby
  • RunType: AdditionalPoller Or AdditionalPollerStandby

The InstallType will never change, it simply shows you which role the server was originally installed with, the RunType dictates if the server is in HA Active or HA Standby roles. We’ll be updating this key to get a poller back to an active state.

First shutdown the HA service on both pollers of the pool that is offline:

  • Open Services.msc
  • Stop the Solarwinds High Availability Service
  • Stop the Solarwinds Administrative Service

On the poller you want to be active, we need to update the registry key from Standby to active

  • Open Regedit
  • Navigate to HKLM>Software>WOW6432Node>Solarwinds>HighAvailibity
  • Update the ‘RunType’ key from either MainPollerStandby or AdditionalPollerStandby to MainPoller or AddititonalPoller.
  • Start the Solarwinds Adminstration Service
  • Start the SolarwindsHighAvailibity Service

Once the services come back online, the server will update the database with the new run type and the Administrative service will start-up the remaining Solarwinds services. To confirm your poller is working as intended, you can review its state on the High Availability Summary page under all settings. If you expand your affected poller pool, the server we just started the services for will show a green status icon, and a state of ‘Active’.

Finally, you can restart the previously stopped services on your Standby server to restore its fail-over role.

On the standby server:

  • Open Services.msc
  • Start the Solarwinds Adminstration Service
  • Start the SolarwindsHighAvailibity Service

To test your HA pool, you can select the ‘Force Failover’ command to move the active poller role to the standby server, and vice versa. If the role moves over without issue, you are all set.

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