Failover NIC on separate switch

[Luis Toro]

I have read several docs on APA and MC/SG. I have neither on an RP8400 and would like to setup a "standby" lan card connected to a separate switch (in case the switch goes bad). APA sounds nice, but the diagrams on the white paper I read show all connections going to a single switch. Can I use APA over 2 switches (same VLAN) ? Will MC/SG solve this ?
Thank you

[Charles McCary]

Luis,

MCSG is definitely configurable so that you can have one card on one switch and one on another, and have one be a standby for the other. What would happen from an SG perspective, is that if the primary card stopped working, the switch to the standby card would be automatic. Not sure how this relates to APA though.

[melvyn burnard]

As far as I know, for the APA "standby" to work, they must go through the same switch.
ServiceGuard, on the other hand, will allow separate switches, but there must be a link between the two switches, i.e. the primary and the standby lan must be able to talk to each other across the switches.

Take a look at the docs for APA and ServiceGuard on:
http://docs.hp.com

[Nick Wickens]

We run Service Guard with a backup NIC on a seperate switch. If you do this you need to ensure that the backup NIC remains unconfigured (ie do not assign IP address etc). You then just add the following line only into the Service Guard Configuration file -

NETWORK_INTERFACE lan4

- where lan4 is your unconfigured card .

Make sure you do NOT add an IP address config line for this card (as you will have done for the primary card.) as it will use the same IP address as the primary card on failover.

[sven verhaegen]

well this depends for what you use the connection , if it is for only failover functionality APA uses in fact a form of LanMonitor which is what serviceguard uses , so failover should work on 2 switches as it doesn't require PAGP capable ports , however in loadbalancing that's another ballgame , you need PAGP capable ports and as this is not VLAN'ing (it is a special protocol ) that needs to happen on the same switch