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

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.com/kb/community/knowledgebase
Red Hat has documented a set of best practices for the High Availability Add-On and related products
in the following Knowledgebase article:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cluster, High Availability, and GFS Deployment Best Practices
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/40051
The topics discussed in this article include:
• Cluster node hardware selection
• Storage and network configuration practices
• File systems
• Quorum disk usage
• Cluster membership timing customization
• Disaster tolerant multi-cluster and stretched cluster configurations
The article includes pointers to other Knowledgebase articles documenting best practices and other
useful information for cluster subsystems or other related products. The article also describes
configurations and use cases that are explicitly unsupported. RHEL clustering is very flexible, and as
a result, you could construct a cluster configuration that is not supported by Red Hat. Consequently,
prior to deployment, Red Hat requires an architecture review of proposed clusters configured with
certain features or addressing certain use cases. The best practices document identifies the features
and use cases that require Red Hat architecture review. If you plan to design and deploy RHEL
clusters, you should regard this document as mandatory reading.
The following Knowledgebase article documents the cluster architecture review process:
Architecture Review Process for Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability, Clustering, and
GFS/GFS2
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/53347
Reference configurations
No tested reference configurations of the High Availability Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
its associated products on HP ProLiant servers are available at this time. Although all ProLiant server
models can be used as RHEL cluster nodes, for best results HP recommends that you select products
other than the Microserver and WS460c blade workstation.
Configuration considerations
This section presents considerations that will help you get the best results when configuring and
running the High Availability Add-On and its associated products on HP ProLiant servers.
Selection of fence agents for HP Integrated Lights Out management
processors
The fence_ilo fence agent is commonly used when configuring older HP iLO and iLO 2
management processors as fence devices for RHEL clusters. (When an iLO 2 management processor
is running firmware revision 2.00 or greater, Red Hat prefers fence_ipmilan.) However, the