Configuring EFM v23.41.0

TPA will install and configure EFM when failover_manager is set to efm.

The version of EFM to be used can be configured by changing the efm_version:

cluster_vars:
  …
  failover_manager: efm
  efm_version: 5.2
  …

It can also be defined when executing tpaexec configure:

tpaexec configure my-cluster-dir -a M1 --failover_manager efm --efm-version 5.2

Note that EFM is only available via EDB's package repositories and requires a valid subscription.

EFM configuration

TPA will generate efm.nodes and efm.properties with the appropriate instance-specific settings, with remaining settings set to the respective default values. TPA will also place an efm.notification.sh script which basically contains nothing by default and leaves it up to the user to fill it in however they want. TPA will override the default settings for auto.allow.hosts and stable.nodes.file to simplify adding agents to the cluster.

See the EFM documentation for more details on EFM configuration.

efm_user_password_encryption

Must be either scram-sha-256 or md5

Set efm_user_password_encryption to control the auth-method for the efm Postgres user's auth-method in pg_hba.conf as well as the algorithm used when generating its encrypted password.

efm_user_password_encryption: 'scram-sha-256' # or can be set to `md5`

efm_conf_settings

You can use efm_conf_settings to set specific parameters. These must be written as entries in an Ansible dictionary, in key: value form

See the documentation on the efm.properties file for details on which settings can be configured.

cluster_vars:
  efm_conf_settings:
     notification.level: WARNING
     ping.server.ip: <well known address in network>

If you make changes to values under efm_conf_settings, TPA will always restart EFM to activate the changes.

EFM witness

TPA will install and configure EFM as witness on instances whose role contains efm-witness. For such instances the upstream property must be specified to point to the designated primary database instance.

Repmgr

EFM works as a failover manager and therefore TPA will still install repmgr for setting up postgresql replicas on postgres versions 11 and below. repmgrd i.e. repmgr's daemon remains disabled in this case and repmgr's only job is to provided replication setup functionality.

For postgres versions 12 and above, any cluster that uses EFM will use pg_basebackup to create standby nodes and not use repmgr in any form.

Node Promotability

TPA determines whether a node is eligible for promotion by EFM during failover based on the node's role and replication topology. The following rules are applied when generating the EFM configuration:

• Witness nodes (witness role) are never promotable.
• Nodes with the efm-not-promotable role are not eligible for promotion. This can be used to prevent specific standbys, such as DR or reporting nodes, from being promoted to primary.
• Cascading standbys (nodes that are not directly replicating from the primary) are also not promotable.
• All other nodes are considered promotable by default.

To explicitly prevent a standby from being promoted, add efm-not-promotable to the node’s roles list in your cluster configuration. This ensures that EFM will not attempt to promote this node during failover events.

Minor update for EFM using tpaexec upgrade

When upgrading EFM, set the efm_version in config.yml to reflect the desired version.

TPA installs the package for the new version and copies over the configuration files from the existing EFM version's configuration directory into the new EFM version's configuration directory, and removes the existing EFM version's package, service file and binary directory for cleanup.

Because EFM upgrade depends on a previous version being installed and configured (the source), TPA first checks to ensure this is true. In the event a source EFM version is not installed (it's binary directory does not exist) or not configured (it's configuration directory does not exist), the upgrade will exit with an error. When running the upgrade, if the target EFM version (specified by efm_version in the config.yml) already has a binary directory and configuration directory, upgrade skips over EFM as it is already installed and configured to the desired version.

To select EFM for upgrade, ensure the --components flag passed to the tpaexec upgrade command contains efm (or all)

Refer to the section on component selection for upgrade for more information.