serviceguard

[Shivkumar]

Dear Sir,

Is MCServiceguard better than veritas cluster for hpux ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

according to HP's press releases from as close as 6 months ago, Veritas Cluster was supposed to replace MC Service Guard in the upcoming versions of HP-UX but as far as I heard this plan was scrapped and MC SG is here to stay. Which one is better is a matter of preference. MCSG has a wide installed product base among hp-ux customers and a lot of sysadmins like it for its simplicity and it does what it is designed to do. Veritas cluster comes with more bells and whistles but this is only what I heard, never actually setup a cluster using VxCluster. I prefer to stick with something I already know, i.e., MCSG but this is just a preference.

[Devesh Pant_1]

Shiv,

Each of the products can claim to be better than the other. We come to know from experience and preferences and use of other dependent infrastructure that one is better ot the other.

My preference for simple clustering is MC Serviceguard. However I have seen some benefits of Veritas clustering with Sun servers as well.

thanks
DP

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

According to my small experience with Veritas, it looks OK if you don't have applications which require a lot of memory. When used memory is near 100%, the computers got stuck.

BTW, Veritas has much more problems with licensing.

HTH

[Alex Lavrov.]

Hello,

Well, choosing a cluster is a bit more complicated than just wondering which is better. Every cluster has it advantages and disadvantages. It's all depends on your need. Asl I know Veritas cluster is more powerfull , but also is more complicated than MCSG. On other hand, it's also expensive.

You need to define your needs. What do you expect from your cluster to do?

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi Shiv

Installed base for MC Service gaurd is more than Veritas Cluster on hpux. MCSG is easy to configure & support and a stable product

Regards
Mahesh

[Fabio Ettore]

Hi Shiv,

an interesting roadmap:

http://h30097.www3.hp.com/pdf/hpux11i_roadmap_and_v4.pdf

You will find information about clustering solution on HP-UX.

Anyway I didn't see a lot of cluster on HP-UX with Veritas Cluster and I suppose because MC Service Guard works so fine on HP-UX. So I think in the future Service Guard will be the cluster solution yet on HP-UX.

Hope this helps you.

Best regards,
Fabio

P.S.: Shiv, I saw you posted several thread in last days. Sure you see ITRC forum site a great forum, full of experts and experience.
However please assign points for efforts to all people helped you and close your threads.
Thanks a lot for your collaboration and good enjoy on ITRC forum!

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Shiv,

as usually with these kind of threads this is a matter of personal likes and dislikes.

We run both types of clusters
but the majority being MC/SG clusters,
and the VCS runs on Solaris 8 on FSC PrimePowers (so a very mixed bunch which has some not to be neglected nasty implications).

From this background I can report from my (probably biased) little experience.

First I have to mention that the OS integration on HPUX platforms with all HPUX software (this mainly relates to LVM and MC/SG) is much more seamless.
Therefore in my humble opinion I would consider HPUX products to be much more disaster recovery tolerant than the Veritas products.
This yields from the Veritas products (i.e. VxVM, VCS) being a supplemantary add-on to but not integral part of the OS
(probably because there is no such OS like VxUX).
The weakest point in my opinion being the clumsy rootability of VxVM.
Up until now there isn't easy and painless recovery like you are accustomed from HP's ignite with VxVM which will recover your rootdisk LVM layout (apart from mirroring, but this is negligible) without any need of interaction.
Of course my experience is based on the VxVM and VCS on the Solaris OS.
This might be different if you run these products on HP hardware.
VxVM is, at least in our setup, an absolute requirement for VCS.
I've only discovered not officially supported hacks from SUN and various sysadmin forums how to come close to an automated recovery from, say DVD.
It takes much deliberation and preparation to devise ones own root disk replacement with VxVM.
Because VxVM is an add-on you cannot install the OS (Solaris in our case) right from the beginning on VxVM volumes.
Instead the (Solaris) slices need to be converted into VxVM private and public regions and a rootdg with volumes taking up the former disk slices.
This also means that you are confined in the volume sizes.
You cannot extend any volume from your rootable rootdg without dissolving the whole stuff.
Thus during system recovery there are several reboots involved during which you have to install the Veritas products, change the system file (viz. load the required Veritas kernel modules, and convert your disks in VxVM volumes.
Another issue already mentioned by another reply is the licensing.
During installation of the Veritas products you need to supply various license keys.
This mess all defeats any automating efforts a stressed sysadmin in this situation wishes where he just wants to shove in a DVD or tape (or boot from LAN) and have all come up by itself.

Having said so much about my dislikes with Veritas, on the other hand there are some advantages with VCS.
I think its cluster concepts go further than those of MC/SG.
This gives you many flutes and whistles, as someone has put it.
With VCS you don't define application packages like with MC/SG but service groups that can rely on any conceivable resource.
For most sorts of resources Veritas has already provided monitors.
But the whole system is more extendable by custom monitors.
So I guess a better playground for developers.
Another nice feature is that you can completely reconfigure a VCS cluster while all your applications are continuing servicing.
If you run a "hastop -all -force" you can change cluster services on all nodes without also downing your services.
Only are they no longer highly available anymore.
After you have edited a new main.cf you can simply restart cluster services on all nodes.
With VCS you have many more buttons and screws to play with.
You can for instance temporarily freeze and later unfreeze (I think the propper verb would have rather been thaw ;-) services.
You can remove the critical attribute from single resources of any service group to not make a failure of a resource fail the whole service group.
You can as well enable and disable single resources.
So it's a nice toy which on the other hand makes it less tangible and more difficult to handle.

[Cem Tugrul]

Shiv,

My preference is MC/SG...

Good Luck,

[Devender Khatana]

Hi Shiv,

I would go for MC Service Huard as well. The reason being I have so far worked only with it. I know what it is & how to manage it.
Allthough did not had any problems with other Veritas products as well, but to be frank never had a hands on with Vxcluster.

Regards,
Devender

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Let's put one thing straight here - HP were never going to replace Serviceguard with VCS - thats never been on the roadmap.

What *is* on the Serviceguard roadmap is integration with the clustered versions of Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas Filesystem, allowing you to deploy a true clustered filesystem on HP-UX. This is in place of the integration of TruCluster and AdvFS from Tru64 which has been canned.

As other have pointed out, Serviceguard is much better integrated with the OS than VCS, and is certainly more popular. VCS is really a Solaris product thats been ported to other platforms - It's sales on Windows, HP-UX and AIX are pretty negligible. That's pretty odd because it is a great product - but I know which product I'd rather have installed when disaster strikes - Serviceguard any day.

I'd boil it down to the following... Are you a HP shop? If you are stick with Serviceguard... if you have a mix of other OS's and use other Veritas products heavily then *consider* VCS, but be very clear on what it is giving you that Serviceguard doesn't - it needs a silver bullet in my opinion.

HTH

Duncan