HP-UX HB v13.00 Ch-15 - Serviceguard

HP-UX Handbook – Rev 13.00 Page 6 (of 108)
Chapter 15 Serviceguard
October 29, 2013
What is Serviceguard?
Serviceguard allows you to create high availability clusters of HP Integrity or HP 9000 servers.
A high availability cluster promotes critical business application availability in spite of a
hardware or software failure. Highly available systems protect users from software failures as
well as from failure of a system processing unit (SPU), disk, or local area network (LAN)
component. Hardware redundancy is key to high availability. In the event that one component
fails, the redundant component takes over. Serviceguard and other high availability subsystems
coordinate the transfer between components. Serviceguard can operate on both physical systems
and virtual machines.
What is a Serviceguard Cluster
A Serviceguard cluster begins with is a group of 1-16 HP 9000 or HP Integrity servers or virtual
machines called nodes that are configured with hardware and software redundancy to avoid a
single point of failure (SPOF). Redundant components should use a separate power source to
prevent a single point of failure. Serviceguard is automation software that starts and stops the
cluster, starts/monitors/stops packages, and reacts to network failures and node and application
service failures by either bringing standby NICs online or moving packages to adoptive nodes.
Figure 1 illustrates a robust cluster configuration that eliminates SPOFs. Note the user’s path to
data for each application.