Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Using High Availability Strategies

Using Serviceguard

Appendix A958

Serviceguard is an excellent choice for high availability data protection.

It may be used in conjunction with other high availability products.

HP References Managing Serviceguard

http://www.hp.com/go/enterprise

Serviceguard Features

Serviceguard Automatic Rotating Standby

Using a feature called automatic rotating standby, you can conﬁgure

a cluster that lets you use one node as a substitute in the event a failure

occurs. Any package would fail over to the node containing the fewest

running packages.

HP Reference Managing Serviceguard, Chapter 3.

Serviceguard Rolling Upgrades

To reduce the amount of time needed for HP-UX operating system

upgrades as well as application upgrades and patches, you can provide

what is called a rolling upgrade. For a system with many components,

the typical scenario is to bring down the entire cluster, upgrade every

node to the new version of the software, and then restart the application

on all the affected nodes. For large systems, this could result in a long

downtime. An alternative is to provide for a rolling upgrade. A rolling

upgrade rolls out the new software in a phased approach by upgrading

only one component at a time without bringing down your clusters. This

process can also be used any time one system needs to be taken ofﬂine for

hardware maintenance.

HP Reference Managing Serviceguard, Appendix E.

Serviceguard Advanced Tape Services (ATS)

You can use shared tape devices in an Serviceguard cluster allowing high

availability backups using tape libraries and tools such as Omniback.

The ATS facility allows a two-node to four-node cluster to share

standalone magnetic tape devices and/or tape library robotic devices. As

a result, even after a package fails on one node, a backup of the package

data continues or restarts on an alternate node. Device ﬁles