HP APA

[patrick_119]

anyone out there familiar with HP APA with Gigabit ethernet (fibre) adapters. we have hp servers rp7410, 8400 and 5470. we use cisco switches in our network. can hp apa support nic redundancy as well as load balancing on such a setup. our people out here are not sure what hp apa can do for us and at what cost.

Any advice will be helpfull,

thanks in advance,

Patrick

[Steven E. Protter]

The good news: APA is supported on Cisco switches.

I've heard varying stories on whethr you can use APA to team two different NIC cards, or whether you need a dual/quad port NIC card to implment it.

APA increases overal bandwith, also reliability because if one port goes you stay up.

I'm also pretty sure you can't use it to team cards on multiple servers. For that kind of reliability, you need to think about ServiceGuard.

SEP

[patrick_119]

Hi,

thanks for the info. One more question. say APA is to expensive for us. However we have two gigabit ethernet nic's on each box.

is there any way we can ensure redundancy only. let's say we don;t care about load balancing. all we want is redundancy.

any ideas around ?

Thanks

Patrick

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Patrick,

You only have two choices - APA & Service Guard.

Believe me, APA is by *far* the least expensive of the two.

My $0.02,
Jeff

[patrick_119]

But is it not true that APA needs the switch to be enabled which cost a HUGE amount. any idea how much APA on the server side costs. is it per nic?

thanks

Pat

[Jeff Schussele]

I know that only certain switches are supported, I don't know what might be required on the switch side.
But I do know that APA is in the 4-digit range $-wise - whereas MC/SG is in the 5 digit area.

Later,
Jeff

[Steven E. Protter]

I'm working on a scheme that will let me have backup network cards as sort of hot spares. I have some scripts that run tests on the main cards and if they fail, turns off the main card and lights up the secondary on the same IP address.

It uses the ping command to test connectivity

ping -n 1 -m 20 ip_address
rc=$?
if [ $rc -ne 0 ] then
# take action
fi

The problem I'm having now is that network problems can fool my program into failover and my Cisco people haven't signed off on it either.

The last question is how much resources to waist on this test, since it needs to run more or less continuously to keep the network going. Its also an open question what Oracle is going to do if traffic suddenly switches to another lan.

If it works I'll release it as open source poor man's failover. It will never replace Service Guard but it might meet your requirement.

Keep an eye on itrc for it. It won't do beans for load balancing because APA and ServiceGuard can have two open lan cards on the same network with HP-UX.

SEP

[Con O'Kelly]

Hi Patrick

APA will provide redundancy as well as providing greater bandwidth.
Depending on your needs, it may be overkill.
If you're running mission critical 24x7 systems then its definitely a benefit. However a simple script such as Steven suggested can work well if you're only looking for redundancy can suffer slight outages.

The APA Guide details its benefits and the supported switches etc.
http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/J4240-90016.pdf

Cheers
Con

[patrick_119]

Thanks everyone for all the valuable info.

I am trying very hard to find the price for HP APA (server side). cannot find it anywhere. Does anyone know the pricing policy for this. we want to buy the license for one server with 2 NIC's (ports) to test it out (redundancy) before committing.

thanks in advance.

patrick

[Brian Hackley]

Patrick,

List price a couple of years ago one time was around US$1K before discount. If you buy from an HP Reseller/Dealer you might want to check with them.
Sales consultation (United States only)
Ask about any HP product, service or solution *800-752-0900 hours vary by menu selection.

Hope that helps, Brian Hackley

[patrick_119]

thanks everyone.

rgds

pat

[Kevin Wright]

To use APA for redundancy, it is a good idea to have them cabled into different switches, or switch cards, however, in that case, you cannot build an aggregate that also utilizes shared bandwidth.

[Alzhy]

We are in the midst of deploying several HPUX 11i environments on an all GigE (BT and SX flavours) AND using APA -- but as a failover/network redunancy solution -- not as a load balancing one. APA does not only support redundacny and failover -- it also "aggregates" or "trunks" your network connections so that (with proper switch configs) your 2 x 1 GBPS NICS will behave as one superpipe of 2 Gbps - when one fails, you survive on the remaining 1GBPS link.

If you want just the failover features (which we are using) - then I believe most switches will suffice. If you want aggregation and trunking -- then talk with your Network folks if they are comfy/knwokedgeable with LacP (link aggregation control protoccol) or PagP (port aggregation protocol..)..

[patrick_119]

Nelson, Kevin Thanks a lot. Nelson your scenario is almost exactly similar to what we are going thru. We have several HP Ux 11i servers (8400, 7410, 5470). Eventually we will put APA on all of them, but for now we want to test APA in redundancy mode only. We know the cost the enable port-aggregation on the switch is HUGE so we decide to test it for redundancy only on one server.

Tell me, what sort of a setup do you'll have. how easy is it to setup APA. DO u have any document for this u can share. Any tips or tricks. can we do it thru sam.

Thanks in advance.

regards

Pat

[Alzhy · Accepted solution]

We're also implementing 8400's, rp74xx's and SuperDomes either as whole servers or partitioned ones (vPars and nPars). The switches we connect to are all CISCO Catalyst 3XXX and 6XXX series BUT in our implementation - we are only after redundancy so we do not actualy employ (yet) aggregation or trunking (part of the reason actually is PagP and LacP -- seems Greek even to our CCNA's and Network Guri).

Configuration is easy -- specially the redundancy (AKA manual) mode. Do it via SAM and it is pretty much self explanatory. The only reminder I can think of is make sure your switch and your NIC settings matches -- for 100BT - have your and the CISCO ports set at Manual, Full 100. FOr GiGE SX or BT, make sure you're AUTO on both ends.

HTH.

[patrick_119]

Hi Nelson,

Thanks a lot. Those tips will be helpfull. One last question. Is there any particular manual u followed out of the many i see on hp.doc. i havenot looked at SAM and will check it out. Many thanks once again. Will revert back once i have got the setup working.

rgds

Pat

[Alzhy]

To tell you honestly, I did not even read the manual.. I relied everything on SAM. AFter I did it on SAM, I did a check on the pertinent /etc/rc.config.d files which are: hp_apaconf, netconf and hp*lanconf (depending on your NIC). And studied the changes -- so now I should just be able to edit the pertinent files.

But I believe the manuals are very well written for whatever mode you choose..

[patrick_119]

Thanks Nelson for the info.

rgds

Pat

[Brian Markus]

This is EXTREMLY important for all APA users!!!

Patch PHNE_28777 APA cumulative patch can and most likely will break your machine.

Last week I had networking die after applying this patch.

The patch alters what lines are required in the following files:

/etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaconf
/etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaportconf

In the patch â Special Install Instructionsâ says that there is a new parameter, and you can get a new configuration file from /usr/newconfig/etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaconf However, it doesn't say much more than that. You need to look in the hp_apaportconf file and make the mode in that file equal to the mode in the hp_apaconf file. Here is what I set mine to in the /etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaconf

HP_APA_DEFAULT_PORT_MODE=MANUAL

I wanted to throw this up someplace for everyone to see.

-B

[patrick_119]

Thanks a lot Brian. This tips are practical and priceless.

rgds

Pat

[Todd Whitcher]

Hi Patrick,

It looks like everyone has made some great suggestions etc. Here is the manual you were looking for.

http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/J4240-90016/J4240-90016.html

Cheers,

Todd