Designing Disaster Tolerant High Availability Clusters, 10th Edition, March 2003 (B7660-90013)

Building a Continental Cluster
Chapter 5 177
5 Building a Continental Cluster
Unlike metropolitan and campus clusters, which have a single-cluster
architecture, a continental cluster uses multiple MC/ServiceGuard
clusters to provide application recovery over wide areas. Using the
ContinentalClusters product, two independently functioning clusters are
set up in such a way that in the event of a disaster, one cluster can take
over the critical operations formerly carried out by the other cluster.
Disaster tolerance is obtained by eliminating the cluster itself as a single
point of failure. This chapter describes the configuration and
management of a basic continental cluster through the following topics:
• Understanding Continental Cluster Concepts
• Designing a Disaster Tolerant Architecture for use with
ContinentalClusters
• Preparing the Clusters
• Building the ContinentalClusters Configuration
• Testing the Continental Cluster
• Switching to the Recovery Packages in Case of Disaster
• Restoring Disaster Tolerance
• Maintaining a Continental Cluster
• Support for Oracle 9i RAC Instances in a ContinentialClusters
Environment
For a description of the cascading failover configuration, see Chapter 8.
Refer to Appendixes C and D for additional information on the
ContinentalClusters command set and on configuration file parameters.
NOTE This chapter only briefly addresses data replication, highly available
WANs, and site security and communication. Chapters 6 and 7 give
details on physical data replication using the HP StorageWorks E Disk
Array XP Series with Continuous Access XP and the EMC Symmetrix
with the SRDF facility. Information on logical data replication via the