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

InfiniBand:

• The HP BLc 4X DDR InfiniBand Mezzanine card, which requires the HP BLc 4X DDR IB Switch

Module (figure 15), is supported with Serviceguard

Figure 15: HP BLc 4X DDR InfiniBand Mezzanine cardand HP BLc 4X DDR IB Switch Module

• Considerations for InfiniBand use:

– Few applications use native InfiniBand protocol; thus requiring the use of IPoverIB protocol (e.g.,

Oracle RAC 10g and 11g currently support only IPoverIB), which dramatically increases CPU

overhead

– If VERITAS CVM or CFS is used, InfiniBand must not be configured as the Serviceguard cluster

heartbeat

– Using InfiniBand limits the ability to have high availability configurations for the Fibre Channel

and Ethernet mezzanine card as the IB interconnect module physically requires two interconnect

bay slots

Serviceguard Solutions Portfolio:

• The Serviceguard Storage Management Suite, SGeRAC, SGeSAP, and Enterprise Cluster Master

Toolkit can be used with HP BladeSystem configurations without any constraints or special

considerations

– Follow published manuals, release notes and white papers for suggested best practice

configurations

• HP BladeSystems are supported with all Serviceguard Disaster Recovery solutions (i.e., Extended

Distance Serviceguard clusters, Metrocluster, Continentalclusters)

Other Areas to Improve HP BladeSystem Solution Availability:

• Consider adding high availability to the Central Management Server. See the white paper titled

“Using HP Insight Software from a Highly Available Central Management Server with Microsoft

Cluster Service” posted at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/c01956953.pdf for

more information.

• Also consider configuring the quorum service as a high availability Serviceguard cluster, which is

described in the HP Quorum Server documentation posted at

http://docs.hp.com/en/ha.html#Quorum%20Server