hp-ux serviceguard and integrity virtual machines

[Arnulf Gercke]

Hello,

we have two rx7640 servers with HP-UX 11iv2. We have to setup an HA SAP System with Serviceguard using Integrity VM.
It seems to me, that there are two ways:

1. Create a VM-guest on each server and handle the VM-guests as if they were real servers. Setup Serviceguard in these VM-guests and cluster SAP with the SG SAP Toolkit as usual.

2. Setup Serviceguard on the VM-hosts, install SAP into a VM-guest, handle the VM-guest as a Serviceguard package and cluster it with the Serviceguard for Integrity VM Toolkit.

Now my questions:
a) Is 1. supported?
b) Are there any known advantages / disadvantages for 1. / 2. ?
c) In 2., do we need the SG SAP toolkit?

Any comment is greatly appreciated.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Serviceguard requires shared storage and a network interface. It works much better if there is a second network dedicated to heartbeat.

I see no reason why its not supported but as usual give the diclaimer that I'm a SG user that does not work for or speak for HP.

If its a single NIC interface VM that is a problem, because the cluster is less likely to be reliable. On clusters that I have run where the only NIC is on a cluttered network, heartbeat and therefore one of the cluster nodes has been brought down by contention.

Tookit: No, you don't need any toolkits to run anything on SG, but why reinvent the wheel. Some of these little toys are very complex to configure in SG and having some canned configurations is a real time saver.

Over, I think you can succeed, you need to open a response center call to be certain of support and I'm not comfy doing it under these circumstances. My opinion changes if each VM machine has access to more than one NIC.

I don't see any inherent advantages or disadvantages of 1 versus two.

You have two systems, why do you need virutal machines to cluster?

SEP

[Heironimus]

I would hesitate to put an entire VM under ServiceGuard. I think you'll have to wait for the entire VM and OS to boot on the second node instead of just waiting for the applications to come up.

[Arnulf Gercke]

@Steven:
Ok, i give the support question to the presales hotline.
Each Integrity has enough NICs (4x GigEther), which will be passed to the VM-guest as vswitches. This should be no problem.
There have to run various development systems with hp-ux and only two of them shall form a sap cluster. Therefore, nPars is not sufficient, so we decided to use additional VMs.

@Heironimus:
Yes, this do we have to consider.
I thought it would be charming to create a package of the whole VM-guest and not to generate application packages.

[Serviceguard for Linux · Accepted solution]

You may want to check out this white papger.

http://docs.hp.com/en/8010/IntegrityVM.pdf

[Arnulf Gercke]

Hey Serviceguard for Linux,
this white paper is really good!
Thank you.

[Serviceguard for Linux]

Glad I could help. I knew it was released recently so needs some "exposure".

Happy "VMing"

[Arnulf Gercke]

My three questions are answered in the
white paper. Think I may close this thread.

[Arnulf Gercke]

Thanks to all!
Bye