topic Cluster alias for NIC - Failover in Operating System - OpenVMS

Cluster alias for NIC - Failover

Sue van Wyk — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 07:39:31 GMT

Hi,
I'm running OpenVMS V8.2-1 I64 in a two node cluster. I know that load balancing is not possible anymore by using the cluster alias.
The users connect to the cluster alias and then depending on which of the two nodes is the primary, the user is routed there.

I would like to know if there are any dcl commands that can be issued to manipulate which of the two network cards in the cluster is active and if you can force the orther card to take over, if you want.

Thanks

Re: Cluster alias for NIC - Failover

John Abbott_2 — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 08:48:05 GMT

Hi Sue,
Are you after sharing the user load on both systems or only using one until it fails ?

This area has been worded differently and discussed several times on the forum. You might find this thread a good starting point.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=385987

I suspect what you're really after is sharing the load over both systems via load broker & metric server.

J.

Re: Cluster alias for NIC - Failover

Andy Bustamante — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:34:15 GMT

You can use the ifconfig command to manage alias addressing in TCPIP. See TCPIP Services Tuning and Troubleshooting at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/732final/6631/6631pro_007.html#tab_dig_options
for the details.

The OpenVMS Technical Journal has an excellent article by Matt Muggeridge about configuring TCPIP for High Availablity, see
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v2/articles/tcpip.html

Welcome to the OpenVMS forum.

Andy
San Diego CA

Re: Cluster alias for NIC - Failover

Heinz W Genhart — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 01:01:04 GMT

Hi Sue

As Andy recommended, you can use FailSafe IP. In this cas you have the advantage of more throughput, better reliability in case of a NIC failure and you can have a load balancing controled by DNS (multi home entries).

Regards

Heinz