Sercvice gaurd and NFS mounts to a NAS

[George_Dodds]

I'm looking to either build 2 x 2 node or 1 x 4 node clusters.

At the moment each server (L2000's) in the old setup is connected via nfs to a NAS, they dont share nfs mounts.

All 4 servers are running informix databases.

What i'm not sure about is if a package is running on one node and then fails over to another node, would there be permission issue to the nfs mounts on the NAS.

Sorry if i'm not explaining this clearly but i'm thinking out loud as to say.

Ta

George

[RAC_1]

I really could not get that you asked. In MCSG, you can have highly available NFS. This is called NFS under MCSG. (If I remember correctly.) If you plan to put informix on MCSG, what you do is put informix on common storage. At any given point in time, the informix will be owned by one node. IF this node failes, the ownership will be transferred to alternate node. (In this setup, the informix ackage will have virtual ip and will be owned by active node)

Anil

[George_Dodds]

Would that work with 4 seperate informix databases?

What do you mean by common storage, at the moment each server has informix installed and running locally but has it's data on the NAS.

[RAC_1]

First check if your NAS is supported by MCSG or not. For all your informix databses, configure that many packages.

Anil

[George_Dodds]

It's a Netapps FAS960, i'll see if it is.

[melvyn burnard]

NAS devices are not supported as shared storage on Serviceguard clusters, but I would suggest that all that you do is use an NFS package to activate the mounts from/to the NAS and then they are available.

[George_Dodds]

Do you mean like some sort of automount so when a package switches to another node the NFS mount is automatically remounted?

It looks like implementing serviceguard is going to be a headache, although i do really want to use it as these are billing servers so i need the HA.

[Kent Ostby]

George --

There is a package you can buy from HP that has a ServiceGuard package for NFS.

You could start up your databases and use the NFS package to access them from the various nodes.

Those package scripts under ServiceGuard would then make the NFS mount points avilalbe on the fail over nodes as necessary.

[George_Dodds]

Just found out that the serviceguard license goes by the number of cpu's and not the number of nodes

since my 4 systems are quad cpu's wqe are being quoted nearly £20k which has doubled my costs for this project, so i dont think it will get the go ahead any way.

I'm sick of HP licensing they are slowly putting me out of a job as we head more towards opensource to reduce cost

[Duncan Edmonstone]

£20K sounds like list price - have you asked for a discount?

And which Open source product do you think will do the job of Serviceguard? Who will support it? Who will fix bugs in it?

You get what you pay for. Open source is free as in 'freedom', *not* free as in 'free beer' - something a lot of IT managers just don't understand. When people focus on acquisition costs they make poor decisions - think about TCO instead.

HTH

Dunca

[George_Dodds]

We have a linux admin here, who i have to admit is damn good so he would do support.

We have allready moved to Linux to monitor systems and network as the HP solution was just to expensive.

Ho hum just another day of fun :)