There has been some confusion on the ability to deploy a VCS Agent with ApplicationHA.
The official ApplicationHA agents have additional functionality to provide wizard-based application configurations such as configuring a service group by discovering an oracle database currently running on the virtual machine. These agents can also be managed by the the vSphere Console plug-in when configured in a VMware ESX environment. These agents will have the knowledge built-in to inspect a virtual machine for the specific application and generate the resources needed to run the application.
Some questions have arisen on the ability to configure a VCS agent that is not currently designated as an ApplicationHA agent.
With ApplicationHA, on both UNIX/Linux and VMware, you can install and manually configure VCS agents with a couple of distinctions:
- The agent has to be manually configured as there will be no support for the wizard based application configuration.
- A single service group can be configured through the wizard in ApplicationHA with supported agents. If the service group(s) are recreated through the wizard, all manual configuration will be lost.
- If service group(s) are created or modified through CLI utilities, any changes made through the GUI (vSphere plug-in or VOM) will result in the configuration being overwritten with all previous changes lost.
- The Symantec High Availability Console does not have the capacity to understand more than one SG in an ApplicationHA configuration, so any changes made within the GUI (vSphere plug-in or VOM) will result in a single application SG.
With ApplicationHA, when using Windows within the virtual machine, installing SFWHA agents into ApplicationHA virtual machines is not supported.
If wizard based configuration is being requested for ApplicationHA, please let us know so we can properly prioritize the application.
