Using HP Global Workload Manager with Serviceguard

Introduction

An important enabler of the Adaptive Enterprise is the virtualization of resources, which are pooled

and shared so that utilization is enhanced and supply automatically meets demand. Virtualization

allows businesses to reduce costs and increase business agility. In a virtualized environment, people,

business processes, and technology are focused on providing IT service based on business demand.

In addition, capacity is allocated dynamically, resources are optimized, and the entire IT infrastructure

is simplified. HP Serviceguard is one example of HP’s leadership in the area of virtualization.

HP Serviceguard builds upon the concept of virtualization by grouping multiple servers into a cluster

to provide highly available application services that enhance data integrity. Within the cluster, HP

Serviceguard monitors the health and status of software and hardware components and uses cluster

management tools to efficiently manage multiple systems. If a threshold is exceeded or a failure

occurs, HP Serviceguard provides automatic failover of the mission-critical applications (from the

failed server to alternate, active servers).

While HP Serviceguard is effective in handling unplanned events, it can also be used for planned

maintenance of your clustered environment. Applications can be moved among servers so that

services remain available to the end user while software or hardware upgrades are implemented.

While keeping applications available is definitely desirable, the resulting mix of applications on the

new system might not use that system’s resources in the most efficient manner. HP Global Workload

Manager, or gWLM, with its ability to automatically re-allocate system resources, enables you to get

the most from your systems—both before and after the application is moved, regardless of whether it

is moved to a different partition or node in the same data center or to a different node in another data

center (through the use of HP disaster-tolerant solutions).

Integrating HP disaster-tolerant solutions with Global Workload Manager and optionally HP Instant

Capacity provides efficiency, lower cost of ownership, and protection of IT resources, through:

• Increased resource utilization within a data center and across data centers for high availability and

disaster tolerance

• Reduced IT capital costs in deploying high availability and disaster-tolerant solutions

• Automatic management of resources across the infrastructure

HP Software Cluster Products

The HP Software Cluster products include HP Serviceguard and the technologies built on top of it.

These topics are discussed in the following sections.

What is HP Serviceguard?

HP Serviceguard is available as a stand-alone product and as part of the HP-UX 11i v3 High

Availability Operating Environment, HP-UX 11i v3 Data Center Operating Environment, and HP-UX

11i v2 Mission-Critical Operating Environment (MCOE). It protects mission-critical applications from

hardware and software failures. To deploy Serviceguard, you organize multiple systems into a cluster.

You then create packages (each with its own IP address) for your important applications. Each

package can run on one of several nodes in the cluster. (You do not need to modify your applications

to work with Serviceguard.) With the cluster and packages configured, Serviceguard monitors the

health of each of the systems and packages. It automatically restarts an application (fails over the

application) on a new system or partition if a failure occurs—reducing or even eliminating application

downtime.