Time consuming solution

[rbarot]

I have five rx2600 servers ( HP UX 11i v2). Each server having two HDDs of 72 GB each. My plan of action is as follows. Hardware config for all servers is same.

1) I want to take a single set of ignite backup so that it can work on any server at the time of server crash and having basic OS.

2) I have mirrored all the logical voulmes on second HDD in all the servers. I want to break that mirror and utilise remaining half space as swap area.

3)I have properiotary database on one server which can not take online backup. I want to take backup using snapshot facility and fbackup or ant utility like tar/cpio etc... Pls help me for complete procedure. Some database files are of 5-6 GB size.

4) Physical RAM in each server is 4GB. I want to assign 2GB physical memory as swap area in each server except one database server

5) we have approx. 40 users and we need to keep all users with equal rights and access to every server. Pls give the detail how it can be done ?

This is all I am asking you as our HP admin left the company before making the things online and everything is on my head and problem is I am not expert in this area.

Many many thanks...

[RAC_1]

1. Take ignite recovery tape from any of the server and you can use it in event of crash of any server. As the hardware configs for all servers are same, this would be fasted way to reciover in ase a crash.
2. Why you want to break the mirror? The swap space should be double the ram you have. You can mamange with one disk only and have mirror disk. This will also serve as a high availability measure.

3. As you said due to proprietary nature of database the online backup is not possible. In order to take snapshot backups, you will have to have Advanced jfs product installed. With this you can take snap shot backup of database file system "(but this will not be online backup per say. This is just snap of filesystem)

4. There is absolutely no need to do that. Define swap as 8 gb on each server. you have 72 gbs disks. If you are short on space, you can use other disk.

5. for having identical settings for all users you can use nis, or simply copy user logins on each server taking care of their home directories, shell etc.

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

1) seems like a good idea. But make backups of /etc too

2) I wouldn't do that. It degrades some perfomance (you now have round-robin read) and a HD failure is covered...

3) You could solve this in a lot of ways. Simple snapshot would be to add a mirror, stop the database, split the mirror, start the database, mount the split and backup it. But remember tar can not cope with files that are larger then 2 Gb. But fbackup or vxdump can.

4) this will mean a crashdump can not be made, but will work otherwise I think.

5) Simple: setup NIS.