Designing High Availability Solutions with HP Serviceguard and HP Integrity Virtual Machines

Selecting the best model to meet your requirements

The following steps can help with the selection of the appropriate configuration model for designing and

implementing Serviceguard clusters when using VMs for consolidation:

Establish design goals:

• With consolidation being the primary goal when using Integrity VM, determine the secondary design goals for the

consolidation effort (for example, high availability for specific applications, good application performance under

normal operations, acceptable performance under failover conditions, etc.)

Cluster configuration design and implementation:

• Architect the Serviceguard cluster node configuration to meet the stated design goals. Follow standard HA design

practices using redundant components (for example, I/O cards, disks, etc,). Refer to the Managing Serviceguard

manual (available on the

high availability technical documentation website) as a design guide.

• Determine which implementation model (VMs as Serviceguard packages or VMs as Serviceguard nodes) would

best support the availability and monitoring requirements for your applications by referring to the example use

cases and usage considerations sections of this white paper.

• Configure VM hosts and guests for optimal network, disk I/O utilization, and performance as part of the

consolidation design. Refer to the Best Practices for Integrity Virtual Machines white paper available on the

HP Integrity VM technical documentation website for helpful tips.

• Avoid configuration complexity with Serviceguard and Integrity VM where possible to reduce implementation

difficulties and ease future support work—remember to “keep it simple”. Refer to the HP Integrity virtual machines

installation, configuration, and administration guide (

www.hp.com/go/hpux-hpvm-docs) for configuration

recommendations and for instructions on using the Integrity Virtual Machines Serviceguard Toolkit. Refer to the HP

Serviceguard toolkit for Integrity virtual servers user guide (

www.hp.com/go/hpux-serviceguard-docs) for

configuration recommendations and for instructions on using the Serviceguard Integrity Virtual Servers Toolkit.

Pre-production testing and post-production support:

• Perform failover testing of all guest VMs (for VMs as Serviceguard packages configurations) and applications (for

VMs as Serviceguard nodes configurations) prior to production release to ensure successful recovery in the event of

a failure.

• Keep all system software (for example, HP-UX, Integrity VM, Serviceguard, etc.) up to date. Obtain the latest

patches and take advantage of newly supported features as the Integrity VM product evolves.

Summary—putting it all together

With the integration of Serviceguard with Integrity VM, there are several configuration models that can be used to

help effectively design Serviceguard clusters when using VMs for consolidation:

• VM as Serviceguard package

– The virtual machine is encapsulated within a Serviceguard package allowing failover of the VM between cluster

nodes (Serviceguard runs on the VM host)

• VM as Serviceguard node

– The virtual machine is a member of a Serviceguard cluster allowing failover of application packages between

other physical or VM nodes in the cluster (Serviceguard runs within the VM guest)

– Combining VMs as Serviceguard package and node configurations

• Virtual machines as Serviceguard packages and as Serviceguard nodes in separate clusters can co-exist on the

same VM hosts allowing failover of the VM guests and application packages within their respective clusters

Using the configuration model that best meets your business and application requirements, you can design and

implement a complete solution that can achieve flexible workload consolidation, application isolation, and high

availability with Serviceguard and Integrity VM.