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

HP Serviceguard overview

HP Serviceguard builds on the concept of virtualization by grouping multiple servers or partitions into

a cluster to provide highly available application services that ensure data integrity. High-availability

clusters are created using a networked grouping of HP Integrity servers, HP 9000 servers, and, if

necessary, partitions as cluster nodes that are configured with redundant hardware and software

components to eliminate single points of failure. Despite failures in hardware (such as a system

processing unit, disk, LAN, and so on) or software (such as operating system, user application, and

so on), Serviceguard keeps application services running. In the event of a failure, Serviceguard and

other high-availability subsystems coordinate operational transfer between components.

With Serviceguard, you group application services (such as individual HP-UX processes) together into

packages. Typically, a package is configured to start on a designated primary node in the cluster. In

the event of a service, node, network, or other monitored package resource failure on the node where

the package is running, Serviceguard can automatically transfer control of the package to another

failover node in the cluster, thus keeping the services available with minimal interruption. Figure 1

shows an example Serviceguard cluster. The cluster consists of stand-alone servers and nPartitions,

each running an application protected by a Serviceguard package that can be failed over to another

cluster node.

Figure 1: Serviceguard cluster example

While HP Serviceguard is effective in handling unplanned events, it can also be used for planned

maintenance of your clustered environment. You can move packages among servers so that services

remain available to the user while software or hardware upgrades are implemented.

Combining Instant Capacity and Serviceguard, you can configure computing capacity (in the form of

core usage rights) to fail over with Serviceguard packages.