Chapter Overview


When I was in high school, a NASA engineer visited from Kennedy Space Center to give a presentation. The presentation covered topics ranging from gravity to centripetal force. I don't recall all of the details from the presentation, but one quote has stayed with me. The quote was in regard to the safety consciousness of the NASA engineers. He said, "In fact, you'll notice every engineer at NASA wears both suspenders and a belt. Just to be sure there's always a backup." I have since learned that the "suspenders and a belt" notion has been around for decades and has become a common figure of speech. However, the concept behind this statement is far from a figure of speech. In many environments ranging from space flight to enterprise data centers, a single point of failure can have dire consequences.

The product that provides the "suspenders and a belt" safety feature in HP's Virtual Server Environment is HP Serviceguard. When Serviceguard is configured properly, an application can run within a cluster without a single point of failure. Any hardware or software component can experience a failure, but the result will not affect the availability of the application.

This chapter begins with an overview of commonly used Serviceguard terms. Next an overview of Serviceguard is discussed, including a description of the planning process for a cluster. The chapter ends with an example scenario consisting of the configuration of a Serviceguard cluster and a package to run within the cluster. The result is an application that can withstand hardware failures that would otherwise have drastic affects on the workload. But with the use of Serviceguard, end users don't notice a difference.

The configuration of a Serviceguard cluster can vary widely based on the requirements of the workload and various hardware configurations. This chapter will focus on a single example scenario to highlight the overall process of configuring a cluster and will not attempt to discuss all of the supported variations in the configuration of the cluster. The mechanics of configuring the hardware and the operating system for a cluster operation are not covered in detail. HP's "Managing Serviceguard" document provides extensive details on the configuration of hardware and the operating system to be used in a Serviceguard cluster.



The HP Virtual Server Environment. Making the Adaptive Enterprise Vision a Reality in Your Datacenter
The HP Virtual Server Environment: Making the Adaptive Enterprise Vision a Reality in Your Datacenter
ISBN: 0131855220
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 197

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