Managing Serviceguard 14th Edition, June 2007

Understanding Serviceguard Software Components
How the Package Manager Works
Chapter 3 71
How the Package Manager Works
Packages are the means by which Serviceguard starts and halts
configured applications. A package is a collection of services, disk
volumes and IP addresses that are managed by Serviceguard to ensure
they are available.
Each node in the cluster runs an instance of the package manager; the
package manager residing on the cluster coordinator is known as the
package coordinator.
The package coordinator does the following:
• Decides when and where to run, halt, or move packages.
The package manager on all nodes does the following:
• Executes the control scripts that run and halt packages and their
services.
• Reacts to changes in the status of monitored resources.
Package Types
Three different types of packages can run in the cluster; the most
common is the failover package. There are also special-purpose
packages that run on more than one node at a time, and so do not
failover. They are typically used to manage resources of certain failover
packages.
Non-failover Packages
There are two types of special-purpose packages that do not fail over and
that can run on more than one node at the same time: the system
multi-node package, which runs on all nodes in the cluster, and the
multi-node package, which can be configured to run on all or some of
the nodes in the cluster. System multi-node packages are reserved for
use by HP-supplied applications, such as Veritas Cluster Volume
Manager (CVM) and Cluster File System (CFS).
The rest of this section describes failover packages.