HA maintenance mode
in Proxmox VE 9.2

HA vs maintenance

The HA stack guards nodes with a watchdog and can fence (hard-reset) a node on trouble. During planned work — firmware updates, re-cabling network or storage, power tests — that behaviour can be dangerous: a maintenance action may look like a failure and trigger a node reset.

Release the watchdogs cluster-wide

Disarming HA (disarm) releases all CRM and LRM watchdogs across the whole cluster at once. That lets you do the work safely without risking any node being fenced. It's a cluster-wide mechanism, different from the existing per-node maintenance mode (node-maintenance), which moves HA resources off a node to the others.

Freeze vs Ignore

When disarming HA you choose how HA-managed VMs are handled:

• Freeze — new commands and state changes aren't applied. Services stay where they are, but HA doesn't react to failures. The safest choice when all nodes should stay up.
• Ignore — resources are suspended from HA tracking; you can manually start, stop and migrate them like ordinary VMs. Pick this when you need to relocate services during the work.

Commands and coming back

You run the operation from the command line:

In Ignore mode, re-arming (arm) makes the CRM recheck service locations against the configuration, so it picks up manual migrations done during the work.