HP Serviceguard Quorum Server for Linux Version A.12.00.00 Release Notes, March 2014

These characters are deprecated, meaning that you must not use them even if you are not using
the Quorum Server, because they will be illegal in a future Serviceguard release. Future releases
will require the cluster name to:
• Begin and end with an alphanumeric character
• Otherwise use only alphanumeric characters, or dot (.), hyphen (-), or underscore (_)
Using this version
For support information, see “Compatibility with Serviceguard versions” (page 7); for instructions,
see “Configuring and running the Quorum Server” (page 12).
Getting the software
This version of the release is available only on the DVD.
Documentation for this version
See the white paper Arbitration for Data Integrity in Serviceguard Clusters, under Quorum Server
at http://www.hp.com/go/linux-serviceguard-docs —> HP Serviceguard Quorum Server Software.
Further information
The most recent versions of user’s guides, release notes, and white papers about Serviceguard
and related topics are available at http://www.hp.com/go/hpux-serviceguard-docs —> HP
Serviceguard and http://www.hp.com/go/linux-serviceguard-docs.
For a current list of patches, known problems, and workarounds, contact your HP support
representative or go to the appropriate Hewlett-Packard Support Centre website: http://
www.hp.com/go/hpsc.
What is the Quorum Server?
Serviceguard cluster products are specialized facilities for protecting mission-critical applications
from a wide variety of hardware and software failures. The HP Serviceguard Quorum Server
provides arbitration services for Serviceguard clusters when a cluster partition is discovered: must
equal-sized groups of nodes become separated from each other, the Quorum Server allows one
group to achieve quorum and form the cluster, while the other group is denied quorum and cannot
start a cluster.
How the Quorum Server works?
The Quorum Server runs on an Linux system outside of the cluster for which it is providing quorum
services.
Within the restrictions specified under “System requirements” (page 6), a Quorum Server running
on Linux can serve a Serviceguard for Linux cluster, HP-UX Serviceguard cluster, or a combination
of clusters of both types.
The Quorum Server uses TCP/IP, and listens to connection requests from the Serviceguard nodes
on port # 1238. The server maintains a special area in memory for each cluster; when a node
obtains the cluster lock, this area is marked so that other nodes will recognize the lock as “taken.”
In recent versions of Serviceguard, you can configure more than one connection between the
Quorum Server and each cluster node; see “Compatibility with Serviceguard versions” (page 7)
and “Using alternate subnets” (page 10).
Using this version 5