Hardware Requirements for Service Guard

[Chassidy Rentz]

Looking into using service guard at a few different sites (with a partitioned rp8400, between 2 N-Class servers, and also between 2 L-class servers). What are the hardware requirements as far as fibre channel connections to posture the system for installing service guard and also any other hardware that is needed.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Chassidy,

The basic rule for clustering is you need at least 2 of everything - disks, disk paths, public/private NICs, HBAs, heartbeat NICs, power supplies, etc. The goal is no SPOFs (Single Points Of Failure).
Also I'd recommend that system firmware be brought up-to-date if it's not already there.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Geoff Wild]

Check out the docs in:

http://docs.hp.com/en/ha.html#Serviceguard

No special requiements for HBA's...if 2 node clusters - both systems need access to cluster lock.

Rgds...Geoff

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

I could not quite get your question as far as the hardware configurations go but any of the above pairs of servers work fine as far as serviceguard go and their intermixes, i.e., an N-class clustered with an L-class etc.

Fiberchannel connections are not mandatory but access to same disk valumes one way or another is mandatory. As you can guess, this can only be attained by fiber-attaching your servers to a SAN and zone the disk volumes (a.k.a. LUNs) visible to all cluster members, or using a Y-type scsi cable and god know I have not seen one of these for the past 6 years or so in any of my data centers. So, fiber optic HBAs are necessary. For the redundancy purposes, you'd better have at least a couple of them along with your SAN equipment provider's path redundancy software, SecurePath for HP branded SAN devices, PowerPath for EMC brands.

Other than that, you will need lan connectivity. A live ethernet port with a standby spare as well as an additional, isolated heartbeat lan port is advisable to have but again not mandatory. Plan as if you can not use system's built-in lan0 as one of those interfaces as in the later revisions of serviceguard, lan0 is not supported for some server ranges as a communications interface.

These are the points off the top of my head. I am sure there will be more and somebody will tell those to you as well.

Hope this helps.

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi

Following are hardware requirement for Service Guard:

1. External Shared storage

2. Minimum 3 Network Cards 2 for failover and 1 for heartbeet

3. Servicegaurd SW. This is a licensed product.

Following link may also be of help

http://docs.hp.com/en/B3935-90063/ch01s04.html?btnPrev=%AB%A0prev

Regards
Mahesh

[Ian Vaughan]

Howdy,
The MSA30 Multi-Initiator (JBOD)has been qualified for MCSG and looks quite attractive if you are just having a simple 2 node cluster and don't already have or don't want to go to the expense of having to build a new SAN? It has lots of redundant bits in it so that you won't get any SPOF's.
Hope this helps
Ian