Designing Disaster Recovery Clusters using Metroclusters and Continentalclusters, Reprinted October 2011 (5900-1881)

2 Designing Continentalclusters
Unlike metropolitan and campus clusters, which have a single-cluster architecture, a
Continentalclusters uses multiple Serviceguard clusters to provide application recovery over local
or wide area network (LAN and WAN). 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 Continentalclusters through the
following topics:
• “Understanding Continentalclusters Concepts” (page 36)
• “Designing a Disaster Recovery Architecture for use with Continentalclusters” (page 48)
• “Preparing the Clusters” (page 54)
• “Building the Continentalclusters Configuration” (page 58)
• “Migrating to Continentalclusters A.08.00” (page 92)
• “Testing the Continentalclusters” (page 92)
• “Switching to the Recovery Packages in Case of Disaster” (page 94)
• “Restoring Disaster Tolerance” (page 98)
• “Performing a Rehearsal Operation in your Environment” (page 103)
• “Maintaining Continentalclusters” (page 106)
• “Support for Oracle RAC Instances in a Continentalclusters Environment” (page 113)
• “Support for Complex Workloads in a Continentalclusters Environment using SADTA” (page 125)
• “Configuring Oracle RAC Database with ASM in a Site Aware Disaster Tolerant Architecture”
(page 142)
• “Troubleshooting Continentalclusters Version A.08.00” (page 151)
Refer to “Configuration File Parameters for Continentalclusters” (page 496) and Appendix E for
additional information on the Continentalclusters command set and on configuration file parameters.
For details of the cascading failover using HP StorageWorks or EMC Symmetrix disk arrays contact
your HP representative.
NOTE: This chapter briefly addresses data replication, highly available WANs, and site security
and communication. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 give details on physical data replication using the
HP StorageWorks P9000 Disk Array family with Continuous Access P9000 or HP StorageWorks
XP Disk Array series with Continuous Access XP, HP StorageWorks Disk Array EVA Series with
Continuous Access EVA , EMC Symmetrix with the SRDF facility, and HP 3PAR Storage Systems
with Remote Copy.
Understanding Continentalclusters Concepts
The Continentalclusters product provides the ability to monitor a high availability cluster and fail
over mission critical applications to another cluster if the monitored cluster should become
unavailable. In the following example, the Los Angeles cluster runs the mission critical application
and replicates data to the New York cluster, which has another copy of the mission critical
application ready to run in case of failover. In addition, Continentalclusters supports mutual recovery,
which allows for different critical applications to be run on each cluster, with each cluster configured
to recover the mission critical applications of the other.
36 Designing Continentalclusters