High Availability Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant Servers: References and Best Practices

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High Availability Add-On for Red Hat

Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant Servers

Linux References and Best Practices

Technical white paper

Table of contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2

Intended audience............................................................................................................................ 2

Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-on available from HP ..................................................... 2

Pointers to Red Hat documentation ......................................................................................................... 2

Red Hat manuals .............................................................................................................................. 2

Knowledgebase articles .................................................................................................................... 3

Reference configurations ....................................................................................................................... 4

Configuration considerations ................................................................................................................. 4

Selection of fence agents for HP Integrated Lights Out management processors ....................................... 4

HP Fibre Channel switches as fence devices ........................................................................................ 5

HP storage as fence devices .............................................................................................................. 5

Disaster tolerant configurations .............................................................................................................. 6

Multi-site disaster recovery cluster configurations .................................................................................. 6

Stretch cluster configurations ............................................................................................................. 7

HP CLX and RHEL stretched clusters .................................................................................................... 8

Summary of content (8 pages)

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High Availability Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant Servers Linux References and Best Practices Technical white paper Table of contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2 Intended audience............................................................................................................................
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Introduction The High Availability Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its associated products are used to construct clusters for: • High availability for applications • Network load balancing across multiple servers • File system sharing across multiple servers • High performance computing HP ProLiant servers are an excellent choice for any of these cluster use cases.
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• Global File System – documents the features of the Red Hat first generation cluster file system (GFS), and provides configuration and management information. GFS2 offers significant advantages over GFS on RHEL5. • Global Network Block Device – explains the use of Red Hat's GNBD with the GFS cluster file system. • Logical Volume Manager Administration – not exclusively for RHEL clusters, but contains documentation for the Clustered Logical Volume Manager (CLVM) in addition to standard LVM.
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to RHEL clusters running on HP ProLiant systems. Some of the URLs mentioned here are publicly accessible, but others require a Red Hat Customer Portal account, as does general access to the Knowledgebase. As new Knowledgebase articles pertaining to RHEL clusters on ProLiant might be added from time to time, it can be worthwhile to search the Knowledgebase whenever considering a configuration or support question. A searchable interface to Red Hat's Knowledgebase is located at: http://access.redhat.
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fence_ilo fence agent is not compatible with the newer iLO 3 and iLO 4 management processors. Using fence_ilo with iLO 3 or iLO 4 results in failures. The iLO 3 and iLO 4 management processors require using the fence_ipmilan fence agent and specific configuration options described in two Red Hat Knowledgebase articles (subscription required): How do you configure an iLO 3 fence device for RHEL Clustering? https://access.redhat.
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• XP 24000 • XP 20000 • P9500 • EVA 4400 • EVA 6400 • EVA 8400 • P6300 (FC and iSCSI) • P6500 (FC and iSCSI) • MSA P2000 G3 FC • MSA P2000 G3 (FC and iSCSI) • MSA P2000 G3 SAS • MSA P2000 G3 10GbE iSCSI • MSA P2000 G3 1GbE iSCSI • MSA 2300/2400 series G2 (FC and iSCSI) • MSA 2300/2400 series SAS G2 The following technical brief addressing SCSI-3 persistent reservations is accessible from the Red Hat Customer Portal (subscription required): How to Control Access to Shared Storag
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Site-level management of RHEL multi-cluster system configurations is largely manual, though selective scripting and use of available tools can reduce workload and improve reliability and repeatability. The cluster administrator must duplicate resource and service definitions and applications in the clusters on each site and maintain them in synchrony.
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HP CLX and RHEL stretched clusters Although RHEL5 and RHEL6 clusters generally support HP’s Continuous Access storage replication technology, Red Hat does not directly support HP's associated Cluster Extension (CLX) software in stretched cluster configurations. However, HP provides direct support for CLX in selected stretched cluster configurations, and works with Red Hat to assure interoperability and to resolve RHEL cluster support issues should they arise.