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The purpose of this article is to provide answers to some of the common questions related to using VMware's VMotion with Appian.
Q: Does Appian recommend using VMware's VMotion ?
A: VMware's VMotion capability has been known to cause corruption inside Zookeeper, which can lead to site unavailability. Appian recommends disabling VMotion for any VMware severs that host Zookeeper.
Q: What does the corruption looks like? What to watch for?
A: Zookeeper is very sensitive to latency. This is by design, since ZK is in charge of coordinating state across the cluster. VMotion's migration process creates enough of a communications gap between the ZK instances that they think a failure has occurred. Ephemeral data inside ZK can be lost and if multiple ZK nodes are migrated at the same time then they can lose quorum, which will cause that data to be lost. In addition, this blip in the ZK cluster will almost assuredly cause Kafka/Service Manager to engage failover mechanism.
This article applies to Appian 17.3 and later.
Last Reviewed: November 2018