Cluster Server 5.0 on solaris 10 General information

First, your crossover cable does not need an IP. LLT (Low Latency Transport) does not use IP. It does not need to be plumbed up for LLT to work.

If you don't have a SAN, you need an external disk drive, such as a disk array, attached to both systems via SCSI cable to SCSI controllers. Then both systems can see the external disks.

Using Veritas Volume Manager, you create disk groups that can be imported and deported from the systems.

With Disk Groups, you can implement IO Fencing thru VCS, it is actually the Disk Group agent that applies the SCSI3 reservations. Your disk array will have to support SCSI 3 Persistent Reservations (SCSI3-PR) for this to work.

What is the mandatory setting for VCS to work regarding to network IP configuration?

Each system has two interfaces (dmfe0 and dmfe1)
dmfe0 is used for the private network (via route the systems are able to reach internet)
dmfe1 is used for cross-over link. (I will configure using LLT and GAB)

Is it possible to run VCS with services without external disk drive and SAN?

Thanks

First you need two network paths, so you need to configure dmfe1 as your heartbeat interface and dmfe0 as the low priority heart beat interface (the only traffic will be a small heartbeat once per second)

IF you have no shared disk, what type of data would you use? If the cluster is for a web page or other application that is essentially read only, then you could have duplicate data on the two systems.

Normally, clustering is used to provide high availability for an application with data, such as Oracle, Sybase, etc

I tested Linux HA and I needed a virtual IP address used by the service I was testing.
What about in the case of VCS? Will I am going to set 1 Virtual IP address for each service to listen?

Thanks for understanding my knowledge of this issue.

VCS uses the concept of a Service Group. A service group is a collection of all the resources required to provide a service, for example a NIC, a virtual IP, an application or file share, etc.

The resources are linked such that the IP depends on the NIC, the Application may depend on a Mount, te Mount may depend on a Volume and the Volume on a DiskGroup.

All the items you need to start to provide the service should be in the service group. To switch the application to the other server, you switch the Service Group.

What about using a linux system with iSCSI as SAN?
Is this solution possible for VCS as shared storage?
We are students and do not have access to the required equipments.

We have:

2 SUN SPARC Solaris 10 systems
2 IDE HDD in each system
2 NIC in each system.
1 Linux box with 2 IDE HDD.

Thanks
Bashir

You could use NFS to share the disk space from Linux, then use the Mount resource to mount an NFS file system on VCS.

Note the NFS resources on VCS are only used if the VCS systems are NFS servers, not NFS clients.

For a non-production training environment this should work. You will not be able to use SCSI3 reservations because the Solaris systems do not "own" the disks, Linux does.

Hope you do well with learning VCS. Continue to send questions and we will try to answer them. Hywell is in the UK so he gets started earlier than I do in the US.

You are right about the NFS in order to obtain a place for sharing data via mounting points, but what we want to test is I/O Fencing and for the moment we can NOT due to lack of hardware.

You mentioned that the VCS system must own the hardware for implementing either SAN or I/O fencing. Is that correct? Is it expensive hardware we need for this or is it affordable so that we could argue with our teacher for buying such equipment?

-------

We have now installed VCS 5.0 on 2 sun systems and we also configured a cluster management console. The installation and configuration ended successfully.

Now how can we access to this console? Do we have to install a Java console on PC?
Can we not access this console via www on port 8181?

---------

Do you have any tutorail of how to setup cluster service for oracle?

Thanks
Bashir

VCS 5.0 documenation includes a PDF on installing Oracle and using the VCS Oracle agent. This should have come with the install software. I assume you ran the installer program, look in the same directory as installer for cluster_server_agents. In that directory is the package for Oracle agent. There is a pdf, vcs_oracle_install.pdf, that has all the information on setting up oracle.

You should be able to access the web console on whatever browser is on the Solaris systems, usually Netscape, at local_ip:8181/vcs.

SCSI 3 PR disk arrays like the ones we use in the classrooms in the US cost about $80,000 each. We also have iSCSI arrays we use for teaching classes on customer sites and these are much less expensive. There is no way I know to fake SCSI 3. Setting up classrooms is very expensive. I don't know who is teaching your class or how much they can afford to spend for computer hardware.

Don't forget you can award points for good answers.