Managing Serviceguard Eighteenth Edition, September 2010

C Integrating HA Applications with Serviceguard

The following is a summary of the steps you should follow to integrate an application

into the Serviceguard environment:

1. Read the rest of this book, including the chapters on cluster and package

configuration, and the Appendix “Designing Highly Available Cluster

Applications.”

2. Define the cluster's behavior for normal operations:

• What should the cluster look like during normal operation?

• What is the standard configuration most people will use? (Is there any data

available about user requirements?)

• Can you separate out functions such as database or application server onto

separate machines, or does everything run on one machine?

3. Define the cluster's behavior for failover operations:

• Does everything fail over together to the adoptive node?

• Can separate applications fail over to the same node?

• Is there already a high availability mechanism within the application other

than the features provided by Serviceguard?

4. Identify problem areas

• What does the application do today to handle a system reboot or panic?

• Does the application use any system-specific information such as uname()

or gethostname(), SPU_ID, or MAC address which would prevent it from

failing over to another system?

5. Only applications specified by HP (or vendor approved) should be deployed in

environments using an HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite bundle with

Veritas Cluster File System (CFS). If you are creating your own application for use

in a CFS environment, some things to consider include:

• Can the application be installed cluster-wide?

• Does the application work with a cluster-wide file name space?

• Will the application run correctly with the data (file system) available on all

nodes in the cluster? This includes being available on cluster nodes where the

application is not currently running.

• Does the application have a robust shutdown procedure to guarantee it will

be down on one node before it is started up on an other node?

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