Move to SG from VCS

[Tony Scully_2]

I have two HP RP8420 servers set up for high availability (ie multiple data LANs, heartbeat LANs, shared EMC SAN attached storage). The OS is 11.11, patched to June 2004. The application is an Oracle database, version 8.1.7.4.

The OS and all the data volumes are VxVM, not LVM.

Currently the cluster software is Veritas Cluster Server v3.5. For various reasons I need to migrate to MC/Serviceguard, v 11.15.

Can anyone provide me with any gotchas, pointers etc?

One specific question is about the cluster lock disk - does this HAVE to be LVM?

Tony

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

I'd recommend a Quorum server, which is optional in basic clusters.

I don't think VxVM is a problem.

I ran a search on the cluster lock question:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=14532

Yes, you need an LVM cluster lock disk.

SEP

[Tony Scully_2]

Steven,

Thanks for the reply, and the link.

Just to dig a little further, before I hit the docs, I assume the quorum server can act for many clusters, and simply needs a network connection to the cluster nodes? Should this network be highly available? Is Solaris supported as a quorum server, I seem to recal LInux being OK. I do have a prospective HP-UX server that I could use, but this is less redundant network wise than may be prudent.

Cheers,

Tony

[Steven E. Protter]

Charles Keenen discusses this in his book HP-UX CSE.

The quorum server can become a single point of failure.

He likes to install the quorum server for one cluster in another nearby cluster to insure it stays online and fails over.

According to this book, you can even use a Linux box as a quorum server. I'm in the process of trying this out in the lab right now.

SEP

[Tony Scully_2]

Steven,

Thanks again. I have a copy of Charles Keenan's CSE book, but haven't looked at the SG sections as I have been working with VCS for around 18 months now. Its been very useful for some other questions though. I have used SG before, but older versions (11.09) that I don't recall having the quorum server option.

This project requires moving from VCS to SG for a short(ish) period of testing.

Sounds like the quorum server is the way to go, I do have an HP-UX in the environment that I can use for this.

Cheers,

Tony.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Tony,

If a quorum server is going to be too difficult, then why not go with the quorum disk. Yes it has to be on an LVM disk, but you can just present the smallest possible LUN from your EMC and use that... It doesn't have to actually go in a package either. There's no problem with VxVM and LVM co-existing.

HTH

Duncan

[Tony Scully_2]

Duncan,

Thanks, I have some HP consulting time on this project, so I'll go with what they advise. I'd be quite keen to go the quorum server route.

If I use the lock disk I'll create a small LUN out of the spare space on the EMC array. Or rather I'll have to pay EMC to do that.

If only we had XP disk arrays instead!

Tony

[Tony Scully_2]

Closing thread.