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

Serviceguard uses packages to group application services (for example, individual HP-UX processes) together, and

are typically configured to run on several nodes in the cluster one at a time. In the event of a service, node, network,

or other monitored package resource failure on the node where the package is running, Serviceguard can

automatically transfer control of the package to another node in the cluster, thus allowing the services to remain

available with minimal interruption.

Benefits of Serviceguard integration with HP Integrity VM

The HP Matrix OE encompasses a number of fully integrated and complementary components that are designed to

enhance the functionality and flexibility of server environments. Serviceguard and Integrity VM are both Matrix

components that provide availability and partitioning capabilities for the HP virtualization strategy. Using

Serviceguard together with Integrity VM provides the ability to:

• Minimize both planned and unplanned downtime of VM guests using Online VM Migration and Serviceguard

failover capabilities

• Migrate workloads using the flexibility of Integrity VM and the control of Serviceguard

• Failover Integrity VM environments to other cluster node configurations (for example, nPars, servers;

Note: HP Integrity VM running within a vPar is not supported)

• Meet the consolidation and high availability requirements of many business-critical customers

• Use Serviceguard’s ability to monitor the health of the VM host nodes, the network and the storage used by the VM

guests

• Use Serviceguard’s capabilities to start, stop, and monitor the applications running in the VM guests to ensure

higher availability

• Take advantage of Serviceguard’s package dependency, package priority, package weight, and node capacity

features to manage and balance virtual machine workloads

• Take advantage of Serviceguard disaster recovery configurations, such as Extended Distance Clusters,

Metroclusters, and Continentalclusters for extending high availability for virtual machines across data centers

• Use the HP Cluster File System (available in Serviceguard Storage Management Suite bundles with CFS) as shared

storage for virtual machine guest backing stores and virtual machine guest applications

• Use the available toolkits to simplify the creation and management of virtual machine guests as

Serviceguard packages

Customers purchase physical systems to improve the isolation of mission-critical and business-critical applications for:

• Providing better security for the applications

• Supporting different operating systems, software versions and application environments

The partitioning capabilities of the Matrix OE can reduce, or consolidate the number of physical systems required to

support an applications environment, which in turn reduces customer costs as demonstrated by demand for nPars and

vPars today. Integrity VM offers finer-grained partitioning of system resources as compared to nPars and vPars, and

can support multiple operating systems on a single physical system. While Integrity VM facilitates application

consolidation and isolation, the integration of Integrity VM with Serviceguard provides the added benefit of high

availability protection for the applications running under Integrity VM.

Designing Serviceguard Clusters with HP Integrity VM

An interesting duality exists with VMs in that they function both as “nodes” running an operating system while at the

same time as “instances” running on a VM host. Since Serviceguard is designed to run on nodes and manage

applications encapsulated within packages, integrating Serviceguard with Integrity VM can yield several different

configuration possibilities. For example, it is possible to run Serviceguard on physical nodes and manage VMs as

applications (i.e., VMs as Serviceguard packages), or run Serviceguard on the VMs to manage the applications

running within the VMs (i.e., VMs as Serviceguard nodes).