Question

What will happen to a droplet when the host machine needs maintenance?

Posted on September 11, 2020
High Availability FAQ
Asked by jclacsam

What will happen to a droplet when the host machine needs maintenance? Will the droplet be down for the duration of the maintenance period? Or, will the droplet be seamlessly/transparently transferred to a different host machine while the original host machine is being repaired?

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Sri Charan Madhavapeddi

DigitalOcean Employee

• September 11, 2020

Accepted Answer

Hello,

Generally if it is Droplet maintenances, we generally tend to perform Live migration , where there is no downtime on the Droplet. If in case, there is an issue with Live migration, then we opt for offline migration.

Refer to below link:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/platform/live-migration/

If it is a network maintenance, then there would be a small latency issues on the network packets but the Droplets should work as expected.

Hope this clears your concerns.

Cheers, Sri Charan

alexdo

Site Moderator

• September 11, 2020

Hello, @jclacsam

There are different kinds of maintenances that we sometimes need to do that have differing maintenance windows and allowed time for action.

In each case customers are notified by email regarding the maintenance listing the affected droplets, the reason for the maintenance, what the possible impact may be, and whether or not any action will be taken on the specific virtual servers.

In case of a live migration where a running Droplet from one physical machine to another in its datacenter without requiring a reboot, meaning there will be no downtime and you will not have any disruption to your running services on the droplet.

You can also check out official documentation about the Live Migrations here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/platform/live-migration/

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex