Best Practices for HP BladeSystem Deployments using HP Serviceguard Solutions for HP-UX 11i (May 2010)

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Executive Summary
HP continues to be tremendously successful in deploying server hardware consolidated into HP
BladeSystem environments. The improved control of power consumption and workload management
with HP Insight Dynamics – VSE software controlling the entire environment bring distinct advantages.
HP Virtual Connect facilitates rapid deployment and infrastructure flexibility, reducing wiring and the
effort to connect servers to network and SAN fabrics. This brings valuable benefits to customers in
small, medium and large enterprises.
HP Serviceguard Solutions play an important role in these environments to ensure mission-critical
application availability for HP Integrity servers. Configuring highly available applications in the HP
BladeSystem has some special considerations that differ from standard server rack-mount or HP
Superdome deployments with HP Serviceguard. Knowledge of HP BladeSystem component
placement, configuring HP Virtual Connect and an understanding of where cluster elements such as
server nodes, quorum devices and storage should be located and configured within a cluster is critical
to maximizing the high availability benefits of Serviceguard. The purpose of this white paper is to
highlight the considerations and best practices for implementing HP BladeSystem solutions that are
made highly available through the use of HP Serviceguard for HP-UX on HP Integrity BL860c and
BL870c blade servers. Note the concepts of designing highly available blade configurations
presented in this white paper will also apply to future generation HP Integrity blade server products
when released.
BladeSystem Overview
The HP BladeSystem is the general name for HP's Industry Standard blade server line. It consists of a
number of hardware components, software and services that are all designed to work together to
provide a rack-mounted, integrated infrastructure for compute, network, storage and power elements.
This section will briefly describe some of the HP BladeSystem hardware components that are the
foundation for its integrated architecture, which will be used as a basis for understanding how these
components can be configured to maximize server and application availability by eliminating Single
Points of Failure (SPOFs) within a BladeSystem solution deployment. As you will learn in this section,
many of the HP BladeSystem components have already been designed with redundancy in-mind to
maximize availability and minimize downtime.
Hardware Components
The following are some of the major components of the HP BladeSystem.
Enclosures
The HP BladeSystem c-Class Enclosures are central component for joining computing resources into a
consolidated, “wire-once” infrastructure. There are two c-Class enclosures available to best meet a
customer’s business requirements, as shown in figure 1:
• c3000 for remote sites & small to medium businesses (rack or tower configurations)
• c7000 for enterprise data center applications