Introduction

HP Serviceguard is a specialized facility for protecting mission-critical applications from a wide variety of hardware and software failures. With HP Serviceguard, multiple nodes (systems) are organized into an enterprise cluster that delivers highly available application services to LAN-attached clients. HP Serviceguard monitors the health of each node and quickly responds to failures in a way that minimizes or eliminates application downtime.

VERITAS Volume Replicator (VVR) support for HP Serviceguard enables you to set up an efficient and reliable failover support for VVR on HP-UX. In addition to configuring the cluster, you also need to identify the applications and services that you want to group into packages. Packages are the means by which Serviceguard starts and halts configured applications. A package is a collection of services, disk volumes and IP addresses that are managed by Serviceguard to make sure they are available.

The package control scripts contain all the information necessary to run all the services in the package, monitor them during operation, respond to a failure, and halt the package when necessary. These scripts are modified to include information about VVR. The vvr.sh script provides the functionality to manage and monitor VVR RVG resource. The package control scripts use this functionality provided by the vvr.sh script to manage the VVR resources along with volume groups and disk groups. For more information on the functions that the vvr.sh script contains, see Understanding the Functions in the vvr.sh Script.

This document discusses some of the basics on installing, configuring, and testing failover of VVR within an HP Serviceguard cluster.