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

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• NFS file systems (with Integrity VM B.04.30, and Serviceguard A.11.20)
• Files on any of the storage types listed above, including files on a Cluster File System (CFS)
The VM guest backing stores must reside on shared storage so that it is accessible by all VM hosts that will run the
package in the Serviceguard cluster to allow failover of the VM guests. Configuring shared storage for VM hosts is
accomplished in a similar manner as a standard Serviceguard cluster configuration, with the only difference being the
shared storage must be defined as VM storage devices that are exclusively used by a specific VM guest. The Integrity
VM Serviceguard toolkit and Serviceguard Integrity Virtual Server toolkit each provide commands to create
Serviceguard package configuration files for the VMs to be protected by Serviceguard packages. These commands
are designed to determine the cluster shared backing store and application data storage used by the VM guest to be
packaged and will add the appropriate logical volume and mount point entries into the package configuration file for
guest failover.
An example of a VM as Serviceguard package storage configuration is shown in figure 3.
Figure 3: VM as Serviceguard package storage configuration
At this point, Serviceguard commands are used to control the startup and shutdown of the packaged guest. It is
possible to use the hpvmconsole command from the VM host to connect directly to the VM guest and perform a
startup or shutdown of the VM; however, Serviceguard will be monitoring the status of the VM and will react to this
change in status as either a package failure or in an unpredictable way.
Note:
Once a VM guest is configured as a Serviceguard package, it is no longer
possible to use Integrity VM commands (for example, hpvmstart and hpvmstop)
to start or stop the VM guest directly from the VM host.
VM Host
VM Host
Serviceguard VM in Package Failover
VM
Backing
Store
Application
Data
Volume Group
(recommended) or
supported VM
store
Volume Group
or CFS
Serviceguard
Cluster
VM Guest
VM Host
VM Host
Serviceguard VM in Package Failover
VM
Backing
Store
Application
Data
Volume Group
(recommended) or
supported VM
store
Volume Group
or CFS
Serviceguard
Cluster
VM GuestVM Guest