MC/SG vs Veritas Cluster Server

[Rita C Workman]

I found one reference to this in my search...but alas no real answers.

We are working on our Disaster Recovery site setup and are checking into the above.
Currently we are a MC/SG shop. But have been demo'd what seems to be the very cost friendly option of VCS Veritas Cluster Server.

So anyone have have pros or cons on VCS? any experiences with it? any issues with VCS using OBII or NNM? Basically anything you may have had happen or run into with VCS.....

Thanks,
Rita

[Duncan Edmonstone]

No direct experience, but a couple of things to look out for (most of these are just opinions actually!):

-The version of VCS for HPUX usually runs at least a release behind the solaris version - make sure the features your being sold actually exist in the HPUX version. Also ask about the number of implementations and reference sites on HPUX.

-Check out the Veritas support for HPUX, again as a lot of the installations are Solaris you can often run into situations where support engineers don't know too much about HPUX (I've certainly found this to be the case with VxVM on HPUX).

-Remember that Veritas typically won't quote you any hardware costs, even when you need hardware to implement their solution - check out what the costs they have quoted would cover.

-Ask some seraching questions about how VCS prevents split-brain syndrome - this used to be a weakness in some of the earlier releases of VCS - not sure whether this is much improved in newer versions...

-I don't think older versions let you write monitor scripts in shell, you had to use C or Perl.

BUT:

- I beleive there is an integration for NNM available - not sure about OB2

- If you a requirement for clusters based on other hardware such as NT and Solaris, its hard to argue with the philosophy of a sibgle product on all three plaforms.

HTH

Duncan

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

http://h40045.www4.hp.com/pressarchive/GartnerStudy.pdf

The Gartner's report on HP winning tops in high availability over SUN and IBM may not be directly applicable to your query on VCS. However, it is a very detailed study and comes from Gartner. Definitely worth the effort to read especially when you need to perform comparison and/or justification among HP, SUN and IBM HA solutions.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Rita,

I was thinking a little more about this and something else occurred to me - youc should also check out what sort of community support you would get for VCS - I think you can safely say with MCSG, any issues or questions you have will be quickly answered on the forums... (particularly if Melvyn is online!) - do Veritas have a similar offering? As it turns out they do have some newsgroups for VCS that you might wnat to point your news reader at...

Try news://news.support.veritas.com/veritas.cluster_server.english

or if you don't have a news reader:

http://news.support.veritas.com/dnewsweb.exe?cmd=xover&group=veritas.cluster_server.english&utag=

You could try posing the same question there... of course you'll need to watch out for the FUD from the Veritas employees! (and before anyone jumps on me about that, I'm sure the opposite is fairly true on this site!)

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Not sure whats happened to my post there! I seem to have lost a chunk of it

anyway if you go to support.veritas.com and follow the newsgroup link on the right hand side you can get to the newsgroup via HTTP

Regards

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

whoa, and now I don't know my right from left! and something in my last post has screwed up all the formatting!

I'm having a very bad morning... stuck at home waiting for DynoRod to come pay a visit (all brits out there will know what *that* means)

I did of course mean the link on the left!

HTH

Duncan (up to his knees in sewage!)

[Rita C Workman]

Wow...you British men seem to do things differently !
Interesting...screen



I'm hitting this to bring it back to top...

Rita


...points to follow....

[Santosh Nair_1]

We're also thinking of replacing MC/SG with Veritas' solution...mainly for administrative reasons. We are a HP and IBM shop and management is looking to use VCS on both platforms, the argument being that administration will be much easier with the same software running on both platforms. Personally, I would hate to get rid of MC/SG since I'm fairly familiar with it and it works!
But that's just my 2cents.

-Santosh

[Wodisch]

Hello Rita,

I just remembered a bigger customer in germany, where a team of sun-specialists managed to have the first successful switch of a single application in *their* Solaris-based VCS after the short period of almost a whole YEAR!
And they were supposed to know Solaris and Veritas...
So be careful what you really get.

Just my $0.000002,
Wodisch

[James A. Donovan]

Rita,

We use VCS here for our 2 HP-UX/Oracle clusters and I've got to say I'm very happy with it. I feel its one of the few products I've worked with that pretty much just worked right from day one.

My only pet peeve with it is that the monitoring scripts are written for a Solaris environment and sometimes I've found I've had to tweak them to get things right. E.g. some scripts will have "ps" defined as
$PS = "/bin/ps -ef -o pid,args";

so you need to modify the script for HP-UX by adding the "UNIX95= " in front of that.