VCEM Profile Failover and Profile Moves White Paper

This failover functionality is meant to help you in your day-to-day administration tasks and in

particular, the fast recovery of problematic systems. It is built to be flexible and robust to

adapt to different needs and environments.

Getting started with VCEM profile failover

This document provides detailed information on how to use the Virtual Connect Enterprise

Manager (VCEM) profile failover feature and how to initiate failover with HP SIM Automatic

Event Handling.

VCEM profile failover provides a fast method to recover a SAN-boot server that has

sustained a critical hardware failure. The process of profile failover moves the failed server’s

SAN and IP network resources to a spare server. The spare server is then started with the

failed server’s boot LUN. VCEM allows failover to be initiated manually or automatically

through events.

VCEM profile failover is dependent on the ability of an image to run on different systems.

VCEM profile failover does some basic checks for compatibility but it is important that you

understand the limitations of profile mobility.

Key components

A brief description of the key components of failover and their respective roles:

• Virtual Connect (VC) virtualizes server-attached Ethernet and fibre channel networks from

an individual server blade using a server profile. When a server profile is assigned or

moved to an HP BladeSystem c-Class server bay, any resident server blade will present the

MAC and WWN addresses contained by the profile to the external Ethernet and fibre

channel networks. The profile also contains the virtual serial number and virtual UUID

which the server will use.

• VCEM allows you to control failover and perform profile failover operations. VCEM is part

of the Central Management System (CMS). It is installed as a standalone component or as

a plug-in to HP Systems Insight Manager. VCEM aggregates multiple VC Domains into one

or more Virtual Connect Domain Groups, allowing single ranges of MAC and WWN

addresses to be shared across all VC Domain Groups. Further, all server blades in any VC

Domain Group share the same set of Ethernet and fibre channel connections.

For more information see the HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager User Guide

See the latest version of the HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager User Guide at

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodClassId=10008&contentType=

SupportManual&docIndexId=64255&prodTypeId=18964&prodSeriesId=3601866

Introduction