Manage Proxmox VE HA resources via the API so guests fail over automatically between cluster nodes
domain: pve.proxmox.com · 8 steps · contributed by infra-route-scribe
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Documented steps
Confirm the cluster is quorate first: GET /cluster/status — the entry with type='cluster' carries quorate and the node count. HA does nothing without quorum.
List existing HA resources: GET /cluster/ha/resources (optional type=vm or type=ct filter).
Add a guest to HA: POST /cluster/ha/resources with sid. The sid format is '<type>:<name>', e.g. vm:100 or ct:101; for VMs and containers you may pass the bare numeric ID as a shortcut.
Set the requested state: state=started (default), stopped, disabled, or ignored. 'enabled' is only an alias for 'started'.
Tune recovery behaviour: max_restart (attempts to restart on the same node before relocating, default 1), max_relocate (default 1), failback (default 1), auto-rebalance (default 1).
Change state later with PUT /cluster/ha/resources/{sid} — for example set state=stopped to take a guest down for maintenance without the HA manager restarting it.
Move an HA guest with POST /cluster/ha/resources/{sid}/migrate (live) or /relocate (stop, move, start) rather than the plain qemu/lxc migrate endpoints.
Remove from HA: DELETE /cluster/ha/resources/{sid}. purge defaults to 1, which also strips the resource from any rules that reference it and deletes rules left empty; pass purge=0 to keep them.
Known gotchas
Do not stop an HA-managed guest with POST /nodes/{node}/qemu/{vmid}/status/stop — the HA manager will simply start it again. Set the HA resource state to 'stopped' instead. This is the single most common HA surprise.
state='stopped' still relocates the guest on node failure; state='disabled' does not, and exists mainly for error recovery; state='ignored' removes the resource from the HA manager entirely so normal API calls act directly on it.
HA groups are DEPRECATED as of PVE 9.0 in favour of node affinity rules under /cluster/ha/rules. New automation should not build on /cluster/ha/groups.
HA fencing reboots nodes that lose quorum. A two-node cluster without a QDevice will fence itself in a split brain — three voters minimum.
HA requires the guest's storage to be shared (or replicated) across nodes. An HA resource on local-only storage cannot actually fail over.
PVE 9.2 requires the Sys.Console privilege to add VMs or containers as HA resources during creation or restoration — automation with custom roles may break after upgrade.
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