Managing Serviceguard Eighteenth Edition, September 2010

1 Serviceguard at a Glance
This chapter introduces Serviceguard on HP-UX, and shows where to find information
in this book. It covers the following:
• What is Serviceguard?
• Using Serviceguard Manager (page 32)
• A Roadmap for Configuring Clusters and Packages (page 34)
If you are ready to start setting up Serviceguard clusters, skip ahead to Chapter 4:
“Planning and Documenting an HA Cluster ” (page 121). Specific steps for setup are
given in Chapter 5: “Building an HA Cluster Configuration” (page 205).
Figure 1-1 shows a typical Serviceguard cluster with two nodes.
Figure 1-1 Typical Cluster Configuration
What is Serviceguard?
Serviceguard allows you to create high availability clusters of HP 9000 or HP Integrity
servers (or a mixture of both; see the release notes for your version for details and
restrictions).
A high availability computer system allows application services to continue in spite
of a hardware or software failure. Highly available systems protect users from software
failures as well as from failure of a system processing unit (SPU), disk, or local area
What is Serviceguard? 29