Summary

Since my initial encounter with the NASA engineer who told the story about engineers wearing both a belt and suspenders, I've learned that the phrase is commonly used when referring to systems designed with a high degree of fault tolerance and redundancy. HP Serviceguard provides the belt and suspenders for workloads. Serviceguard clusters can be configured to host numerous packages and regardless of whether a node experiences a failure, the package can continue operations on an adoptive node. The result is highly available workloads with hardware and software fault tolerance.

Serviceguard can be configured in large or small clusters. As was shown in this chapter, a cluster can be configured in an environment as simple as a primary node and an adoptive node. The example scenario showed how to configure the cluster and the Serviceguard package using both Serviceguard Manager and the command line. Several toolkits are provided to ease the integration of Serviceguard with several enterprise applications.

Serviceguard has an extremely powerful set of capabilities. The key to success when implementing a Serviceguard cluster is proper planning. If the appropriate steps are taken to plan the cluster, implementation is greatly facilitated. In addition, proper hardware planning and configuration is crucial to the availability of workloads.

Within HP's Virtual Server Environment, Serviceguard provides the tools to ensure that your workloads are wearing both a belt and suspenders.