Maintaing multiple servers

[Craig Irvine]

Greetings,

We are currently running 8 HP-UX 10.20 servers (E,K classes). Of these 5 can be classified as business critical production machines and are being upgraded to L3000/A500 (sorry, I can't remember the new names) running 11i. So at the moment we can get away with similar (ie not properly managed) scripts on each machine.

Soon, however, we will be taking delivery of 3 new L3000's and 16 A500's, 2 x 900Gb SAN's, 2/20 ultrium library for a new project (total redevelopment of our legacy apps for e-business) which has just started so I want to get procedures and policies in place to help us better manage the machines. Ideas I've been thinking about are:
-an area to store a master set of files/configs
-cvs to manage revisions.

We already have disaster recovery procedures in place so it should be only a little extra work to incorporate the new hardware.

Being new to working with many servers I want to canvas other peoples opinions and ideas. What other areas do you think I should consider? Is there some good content I should look at?

TIA
Craig

[Stefan Farrelly]

There is already some software on all your HP servers which controls 'master software/configs' and revisions - Software Distributor.

If you do an swlist -l bundle you can see some already. Each has a name and revision number. You can use SD to build your own locally customised bundle/product - we do. And we distribute it to all our servers to they are in sync. When we change something we update it, add +1 to the revision number, and use swinstall to install the latest version. Easy and controlled.

You should investigate how to build you own software products/bundles using SD - once you know how its easy to maintain and use.

[Tom Geudens]

Hi,
I agree with Stefan. We use SD to distribute changes to 250 remote systems. These changes do not only contain Unix-stuff, but also database stuff (both the software and data), application coding, etc. etc.
So one SD version can contain a new database software version, a completely new database schema, a new version of the application (which we do through pvcs), ... All this is packaged, distributed and configured automatically (using Control-M as scheduler).

Regards,
Tom

[melvyn burnard]

You may want to take a look at Service Control Manager.

From http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=B8339BA


overview
Servicecontrol Manager

This version of Servicecontrol Manager is for HP-UX 11i.

Features and Benefits

Servicecontrol Manager enables systems administrators to:

Perform and monitor administration tasks on more than one node or node group with a single command.
Authorize users to run specific tools on specific nodes or node groups.
Track which users are performing administration tasks.
Integrate your own tools and scripts.



Manuals are available at:
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/netsys/index.html#ServiceControl%20Manager


HTH

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi

If you not already have done this I think you should have a look at Ignite. A Ignite server will be very useful for managing a large number of HP-UX servers.
Some features:

Installing OS and applications from the network.

GUI where you can see all your servers and a database where all configurations are stored.

System backup/restores from the network (in a few minutes).

"Golden Images", Install and configure one server and use this as a "master" for the rests.