VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves White Paper

25
• Post-Failover commands. Some examples include:
o
Importing Virtual Machines to an ESX Host
o
Creating Trouble ticket for source system maintenance
o
Sending email to administrators notifying them that a failover has occurred
These custom scripts can be used to create a Systems Insight Manager Custom Task and
combined with the aforementioned Action-on-Events so that they can be initiated in response
to system health events. See the HP Systems Insight Manager User Guide for more detailed
information concerning custom tasks.
Using a remote system to initiate failover
Remote monitoring and VCEM profile failover
If you are using a remote system to monitor servers, VCEM profile failover is still possible. An
example could be where one system is being used to monitor server health and another
system is running the VCEM implementation. Monitoring systems remotely indicates that
Systems Insight Manager’s discovery is not set to run automatically at periodic intervals on
the VCEM system. This means that VCEM will not have access to reliable information about
servers such as host names or IP addresses. For this example, you can still use the VCEM
CLI, specifically the enclosure:bay nomenclature.
Initiate Failover using enclosure and bay
The enclosure:bay CLI command can be applied if another system is used to monitor
and inventory systems information. You will need to derive some way to access the CLI
running on the VCEM system. SSH would be a logical choice. Once the remote system has
logged into the VCEM system, it can invoke the VCEM CLI with the enclosure and bay of the
defective server.
The following example uses an enclosure named Databases with a defective server in bay 8:
vcem –failover –bay Databases:8
This would initiate a VCEM profile failover on the profile that is assigned to bay 8.
Limitations of using a remote system to monitor systems:
Accurate data is crucial to a successful execution of VCEM failover from a remote system.
The system monitoring and data collection system needs to be able to:
• Identify that a problem has occurred.
• Have the ability to invoke the VCEM CLI remotely.
• Have accurate data concerning the enclosure name and the appropriate bay number
of the affected server.
If the remote system has difficulties with the above tasks, HP recommends that Systems Insight
Manager be used for system monitoring as VCEM is designed to closely integrate with
Systems Insight Manager monitoring and data collection capabilities.