Using HP Serviceguard for Linux with Red Hat KVM Guests, May 2013

Technical white paper | Using HP Serviceguard for Linux with Red Hat KVM Guests
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Cluster with KVM guests and physical machines as cluster nodes
In this configuration a cluster can be formed with KVM guests and physical machines. Serviceguard is installed on the KVM
guests, physical machines and a cluster is formed among them. Serviceguard provides high availably to the applications
running as packages in the VMs, physical machines and fails over the application to stand by nodes in case of failures. As
mentioned in the above configuration, in this case also the cluster nodes must be equitably distributed.
The below figure shows an example where KVM guests are used to consolidate nodes within the clusters. A single standby
host is used to run two separate VM guests that are each part of two different Serviceguard clusters. The packages that are
normally running on primary physical nodes can failover to their corresponding KVM guest failover nodes running on a
single standby KVM host.
Figure 3. Cluster with KVM guests and physical machine
Network topology for Serviceguard cluster using KVM guests
HP Serviceguard for Linux recommends having a highly available network configuration with redundant heartbeats and
redundant data networks to avoid single point of failures. The following section describes how to achieve network
redundancy using bridged network configuration (also known as physical device sharing).
Figure 4 shows a typical network configuration where four KVM guest across two physical hosts are bridged to form an
HP Serviceguard for Linux cluster with redundant heartbeat networks.