Steps to remove a damaged Primary Node and assign a new Primary Node to a Portal Cluster

What are the steps that can be used to remove a damaged Primary Node from an IBM® WebSphere® Portal cluster and assign another node to the role of Primary Node ?

If there is an event that causes issues with the Primary Node in the cluster, such as a failed upgrade, hardware failure, etc, there is a requirement that a Primary Node be identified in the Portal Cluster for maintenance and other tasks. To assign the Primary Node role to another cluster member and remove the damaged member, follow these instructions. 1. Remove Primary node from traffic: Stop IP traffic to the node you are upgrading: If you are using the IP sprayers for load balancing, reconfigure the IP sprayers to stop routing new requests to the node. If you are using the Web server plug-in for load balancing, perform the following steps to stop traffic to the node: i. In the Deployment Manager administrative console, click Servers>Clusters>cluster_name>Cluster members to obtain a view of the collection of cluster members. ii. Locate the cluster member you are removing and change the value in the Configured weight column to zero. NOTE: Record the previous value to restore the setting when the upgrade is complete. iii. Click Apply to apply the change. iv. If automatic plug-in generation and propagation is disabled, manually generate and/or propagate the plugin-cfg.xml file to the Web servers. If you have a local Web Server on the node you are removing, stop the local Web server. Shut down the Portal Server on the node you are removing. 2. Assign Primary Node classification to a secondary node: Since the Portal Server uses the flag PrimaryNode= for running its configuration tasks, you need to maintain one Primary node in each cluster for that purpose. To Designate a new Primary Node: Select an existing secondary node. Navigate to /PortalServer/config/ Open wpconfig.properties file in a text editor. Change the following value: PrimaryNode from false to true. example: PrimaryNode=true. Save the changes. 3. Remove damaged node from cluster configuration: Given that you may not want to troubleshoot this node, and instead build a new node to add to the cluster, please follow these instructions: WAS 6.0: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.nd.doc/info/ae/ae/rxml_removenode.html WAS 6.1: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.nd.doc/info/ae/ae/rxml_removenode.html and remove the affected node from the cluster. 4. (optional) Uninstall/reinstall node and add back to Cluster: Once you have the working cluster with the new Primary Node, you can choose to rebuild this node and add it back to the cluster at a later time as a secondary node. These steps should provide you with a working cluster with a new WebSphere Portal Primary Node.