mcsg

[khilari]

Hi people, i wanted to get a thread or from ur experience about mc service guard.From installation to trouble shooting.
Thanks.

[Jeff_Traigle]

You want us to tell you everything there is to know about Serviceguard? Maybe the actually Serviceguard documentation is what you really want.

http://docs.hp.com/en/ha.html

[A. Clay Stephenson]

It works very well and surprisingly very seldom comes into play. By the time you get your systems robust enough, routine things like disk failures and network failures are handled long before MC/SG itself comes to the rescue. I have never had a package failover other than those which were user-initiated in well over six years.

You need to be well-versed in LVM and/or VxVM, networking, and failure analysis long before you begin to study MC/SG.

[Geoff Wild]

I have been using it for almost 5 years now - and it works quite well.

Installation is a breeze - if you follow the step by step instructions (see the docs on docs.hp.com).

Troubleshooting - very easy - once again - everything is logged -so you only need to be good at following along.

That said, experience is worth a lot - I'm SG certified (the hands on way) - and you do need to be well versed in other sysadmin concepts - like LVM, networking, OS tasks, etc...

Training from HP is great - and I highly recommend it.

http://www.hp.com/education/courses/h6487s.html


Rgds...Geoff

[Sandman!]

Hi,

Here'a a good summary on the howtos of MC/ServiceGuard.

http://www2.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000079971888

hope it helps!

[Bill Hassell]

Installation of MC/SG is indeed quite easy. The hard part is designing and connecting all the components, then configuring and testing the entire system. You can't cobble together a bunch of unrelated computers, disks and LAN cables and expect it to work correctly. You'll also need to understand the application(s) that will be running on the system so you can write monitoring scripts as part of the failover steps.

[Kent Ostby]

Rule #1 .. Increase the node timeout from the default to 2000000 to 8000000.

[Nguyen Anh Tien · Accepted solution]

THis is really in depth document:
http://docs.hp.com/en/B3936-90079/index.html
it includes:
1, Overview
2, Understanding
3, Planning and documents
4,.Building HA application
5..configure and maintain
and Trouble shootings
HTH
tienna

[Thomas J. Harrold]

I have been using MC/SG for 10 years, and it has been very stable.

I like the fact that it is also available on Linux. No additional learning curve!

-tjh

[khilari]

Hi people, thanks for ur replys. I will be giving u all 10 each :). Just one more question. Any white papers or suggestions as to how to make an oracle package..... and what r some of the things i should keep into considertion while doing it. And what about start and stop scripts.. Dont the DBA'S give u those scripts to run, kindly shed some light.
Thanks alot.

[Rita C Workman]

MC/SG is basically easy to do..of course I say that after several years working with it.
Like Clay, you forget about it until you have a failure. Last month we had a major failure...thank heavens for MC/SG.

Now...on the last thing you mention. Your DBA's should write stop/start scripts and you can easily run those from within your MC/SG control file (under user_run_commands).
It's that easy.

What is tricky and you need to think about...EVERYTHING you need to run your application should be within the package !
Remember that UID's for a login MUST be the same between SG nodes. Remember that the major number of your device groups (/dev/*/group) must be unique and the same on all nodes within your SG cluster.
...in other words...get the book and read it. You'll be glad you did. If you can get to class, like was mentioned...then go. I agree that it was time well spent.

Hope this helps...and that you enjoy MC/SG as much as we do !

Rgrds,
Rita