Automation of two HP SIM 5.1 or 5.2 servers to provide Failover Event Handling (44776-001, January 2009)

In very large environments, one HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) may not provide all the
coverage needed for all the devices or for disaster recovery (DR
). It might be desirable to have two
HP SIM servers covering for each other. In this scenario, we will create a set of Event Handlers which
allow the two HP SIM (Central Management Server or CMS) servers to specifically watch each other
and take over cov
erage for the other’s Event Notification in the event of failure of one CMS.
The document describes how to create an Event Handler using the CMS Command Line tool mxtask,
one of many CLI tools that come with HP Systems Insight Manager and are documented i
n the
Information Library at:
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/infolibrary.html
.
The goal is to have two HP SIM servers that manage Eve
nt Notification for local devices, say, City A
and City B. In normal operation, City manages only City A servers and vice versa for City B. In the
situation that the HP SIM server in City A fails, it is desirable to have City B automatically detect this
and run a task the would enable it to handle alerts on City A server in addition to its own population.
The basic configuration is that each CMS has a full population of all devices being monitored, both
from City A and B. This document describe
s
a met
hod to achieve that failover.
The steps are:
1.
Create two Event Collections using the customize lists option, one for
City A events, the other
for City B events.
2.
Create an Event Handlers on Server A and B that watch each other and run a custom task
that ena
ble
s
a new Event Handler for the other cities devices when the CMS in question dies.
3.
Create an Event Handlers on Server A and B that watch each other and run a custom task
that remove
s
the event handler for the other cities devices when the CMS comes back
online.
Figure
1
:
Normal Operation
CMS A processes events on servers in A’s territory, CMS B processes events f
rom servers in B’s
territory.
A Watch Dog Event Handlers at each CMS watches for the other CMS to become
reachable or
unreachable and creates or deletes event handler tasks.