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

There are many possible ways to configure Integrity VM with Serviceguard. The following section describes these

different configurations in the form of implementation models to help characterize their differences and highlight their

suitability for use in various system environments. These implementation models are currently supported with several

different versions of Integrity VM, Serviceguard,

and the Serviceguard Storage Management Suite (SMS). For more

details, refer the support matrix at,

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02577783/c02577783.pdf.

Each implementation model described in this white paper includes example use cases and a list of considerations for

using the models in particular consolidation and high availability scenarios. The Serviceguard cluster nodes shown in

these models can be standalone servers or nPars. It is also possible for Serviceguard packages used in VM as

Serviceguard node configurations to failover to a vPar configured as a Serviceguard node; however vPars are not

supported for use as VM hosts.

Integrity Virtual Machines as Serviceguard packages

Figure 2 represents a basic Virtual Machine as a Serviceguard package (or, VMs as packages) model configuration

as supported with Integrity VM. In this configuration, a Serviceguard cluster is formed using VM host systems as nodes

in the cluster, and the VMs are encapsulated within Serviceguard packages. In other words, Serviceguard is

providing high availability for the VMs that are used to run the applications.

Figure 2: Virtual Machine as a Serviceguard package model

The VM guest within the Serviceguard package is protected against VM host system hardware or software failures, in

addition to VM failures. Depending on the type of failure, the VM guest OS can either be rebooted on the same node

or the Serviceguard package containing the VM guest can be failed over to another VM host within the Serviceguard

cluster. This function can be accomplished by the Integrity VM Serviceguard toolkit or Serviceguard Integrity Virtual

Servers toolkit,

which monitor the status of the VM guest and perform the recovery operation as defined by the user.

Note:

Using the “guest application monitoring” feature, described below, allows the

package to startup the VM guest and up to 30 services on the guest.

Storage considerations

VM as Serviceguard package configurations support all VM guests backing store types, including:

• Whole disks

• LVM logical volumes

• SVLM (with Integrity VM B.04.20 and later, and Serviceguard A.11.19 with the October 2009 patch or later)

• VxVM logical volumes

See the relevant Integrity VM release notes for required patches to support specific Serviceguard revisions.

Please refer to “Toolkits for integrating virtual machines into Serviceguard packages“ section for more information about these toolkits.

VM Host

Serviceguard VM in Package Failover

Serviceguard

Cluster

VM Guest

VM Host

Serviceguard VM in Package Failover

Serviceguard

Cluster

VM GuestVM Guest