Implementing disaster recovery for HP Integrity Virtual Machines with Metrocluster and Continentalclusters on HP-UX 11i
Table Of Contents
- Executive summary
- Introduction
- Audience
- Configuring Integrity Virtual Machines as packages in HP Metrocluster
- Verifying failover of Metrocluster packages across data centers
- Troubleshooting Metrocluster VM problems
- Application startup and monitoring
- Configuring Integrity Virtual Machines as packages in HP Continentalclusters
- Overview
- Software requirements for HP VMs in Continentalclusters
- Configuring HP VM packages in Continentalclusters
- Creating VM switches in all nodes of the primary cluster
- Configuring replicated storage for VM in Continentalclusters
- Installing the operating system on the virtual machine
- Testing the virtual guest OS in all nodes of the primary cluster
- Creating VM switches in all nodes of the recovery cluster
- Preparing the replicated storage for use in the recovery cluster
- Creating the virtual machine in all nodes of the recovery cluster
- Testing the virtual guest OS in all nodes of the recovery cluster
- Resynchronizing the replicated storage
- Packaging the HP VM in the primary cluster and the recovery cluster
- Creating a Continentalclusters package
- Creating a Continentalclusters configuration with the VM packages
- Running the Continentalclusters monitoring daemon in the recovery cluster
- Recovering to the recovery cluster
- Related documentation
- Appendix I
- Appendix II
- For more information
- Call to action

19
Metrocluster/Serviceguard can monitor only the status of the VM guest running as a Serviceguard
package—not the applications running within the VM. To monitor the applications running within a
VM, custom application monitoring can be implemented in one of the following ways:
• Guest-based monitoring: A program or agent runs within the VM and monitors the status of the
application running within the same VM. Apart from monitoring whether the application is running
fine, the monitoring program can also undertake some recovery actions in case there is any
problem with the application.
• Host-based monitoring: In this method, a service defined within the Serviceguard VM guest
package can be used to monitor an application running within the VM. It can do so by interacting
either with the application directly or with a customized monitoring program running within the VM
guest.
For more information, refer to the Designing High-Availability Solutions with HP Serviceguard and
HP Integrity Virtual Machines manual, available at
www.hp.com/go/hpux-serviceguard-docs (click on
HP Serviceguard).
Configuring Integrity Virtual Machines as packages in
HP Continentalclusters
Overview
HP Continentalclusters supports the deployment of HP Integrity VM guests as packages. The following
provides an overview of the supported configuration types, types of backing stores, supported array-
based physical replication, and online virtual machine migration feature of HP VM.
In Continentalclusters, HP VM guests can be configured as packages for disaster recovery.
HP VM packages in Continentalclusters are supported in both bi-directional Continentalclusters
configuration and N-1 Continentalclusters configuration.
The following array-based physical replication solutions are supported:
• HP Metrocluster with Continuous Access XP/P9000
• HP Metrocluster with Continuous Access EVA
• HP Metrocluster with EMC SRDF
The following backing stores are supported while configuring HP VM guests in Continentalclusters:
• LVM
• VXVM
• SLVM
• CVM/CFS
• Whole disks
Notes:
1. CVM/CFS will be supported as a backing store only when configured with SADTA.
2. When a whole disk is used as a backing store, only modular HP VM packages are supported in Continentalclusters.
In Continentalclusters, the backing stores will be replicated using supported physical data replication
solutions or using data sender/data receiver packages. There are two approaches to replicating
backing stores:
1. All the backing stores used by the guest are replicated.