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

Advantages:

• Protects against a complete blade enclosure failure

• Provides the flexibility of moving workloads to another enclosure for planned maintenance (e.g.,

Virtual Connect and / or Onboard Administrator firmware upgrades that require all blades in the

enclosures to be shutdown)

• Internal cluster heartbeat network can be configured using Virtual Connect stacking links connected

between the Virtual Connect interconnect modules and different enclosures to eliminate additional

network cabling and switches

• Provides consistent management of server profiles using Virtual Connect or Virtual Connect

Enterprise Manager when all cluster nodes are in blade enclosures

Other Considerations:

• Additional cost for a 2

blade enclosure or other non-blade cluster nodes

• A quorum server outside of the enclosure is required for this configuration

• Configurations must have exactly half of the cluster nodes in an enclosure, complex (e.g., nPar,

vPar) and/or other combination of external servers

Additional Considerations for using Serviceguard with the

HP BladeSystem

The following is a list of the major recommendations covered in this white paper and additional points

to consider when configuring HP BladeSystem solutions with Serviceguard to maximize application

availability:

HP BladeSystem Enclosures and Internal Storage:

• Ensure the firmware versions on all blade servers, Mezzanine cards, interconnect cards and

Onboard Administrators are consistent and current within an enclosure participating in the

Serviceguard cluster and VC domain to ensure reliable application failover

• Since some Virtual Connect and Onboard Administrator firmware upgrades require all blades

within the enclosure to be down, it is recommended to configure Serviceguard clusters between

enclosures and failover applications before performing enclosure firmware upgrades or other

planned enclosure maintenance

• The SB40c Storage Blade is not supported for use as Serviceguard shared storage

• The Internal disks in a server blade cannot be used for Serviceguard shared storage; however they

can be used as boot/root disks with either MirrorDisk/UX or the embedded RAID controller for data

redundancy

Ethernet Connectivity:

• The 10/100 Base-T iLO port on the c-Class BladeSystem Enclosure cannot be used in the

Serviceguard cluster configuration or with Serviceguard relocatable IP addresses

• LAN on Motherboard (LOM) ports are supported with Serviceguard; however for Serviceguard to

reliably detect a LOM port failure on BL860c “A” version and BL870c blades, the Serviceguard

cluster configuration must have the NETWORK_FAILURE_DETECTION parameter set to

INONLY_OR_INOUT (the default for this parameter is INOUT)