Cost-Effective High-Availability Solutions with HP Instant Capacity on HP-UX

Global Workload Manager considerations
The TiCAP solution can also be automated using the HP Global Workload Manger (gWLM) product.
With gWLM, the steps are the same as above except for the Serviceguard scripts. Instead of using the
scripts to activate TiCAP, you define gWLM policies to activate TiCAP whenever a Serviceguard
package is present on a system. These gWLM policies are known as conditional policies.
For more information on gWLM, see
http://docs.hp.com/en/vse.html.
Global Instant Capacity
Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP) is an iCAP capability provided in iCAP 8.01 and later that extends
and enhances the other types of iCAP by enabling you to define a group of servers that can share
iCAP resources such as core, cell, and memory usage rights, and temporary capacity. GiCAP enables
you to:
• Transfer core usage rights from a failed partition on one server to one or more partitions with
inactive components on other servers in the group. With iCAP 8.02.01 or later you can transfer
rights from a server even if all the partitions are inaccessible; this capability is not available in iCAP
8.01. For more information, see the “Using GiCAP to recover from failures (seizing core usage
rights)” sub-section.
• Balance the load across servers in the group, by moving usage rights from a server with extra
unused capacity to another server that needs additional capacity.
• Share optional TiCAP among all servers in the group, providing better flexibility and cost benefits.
Every GiCAP group must be managed using software on an HP-UX system designated as the GiCAP
Group Manager. The GiCAP Group Manager can run on any HP-UX vPar, nPar, or stand-alone server
running HP-UX 11i v1 or later. However, it cannot run in a virtual machine. HP recommends that the
Group Manager be on a server separate from the member systems of the group. In addition, you must
install an HP-defined grouping rules file indicating which server types can be grouped together.
Starting with version 9.0, you may also optionally define a standby Group Manager system which
can be used to take over management of the group if the active Group Manager should fail. Details
about standby Group Managers are provided in “Recovery from a failure involving the Group
Manager” sub-section.
Since a GiCAP group can have members and Group Manager(s) located in different data centers,
you can more easily maintain business continuity in the event of a data center failure.
You must have iCAP software and hardware installed to take advantage of GiCAP. There is an
additional purchase required in order to share resources in a GiCAP group: one sharing right is
required for each iCAP core (each core without a usage right) in the group.
For more information on creating GiCAP groups, see the HP Instant Capacity User’s Guide located at:
http://www.docs.hp.com.
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