Application requirements to work with Veritas HA

[odessit]

I apologize for not knowing much about Veritas on a technical level.

We have an application that works with flat files and is not "cluster aware", i.e. there is no high availability/automatic switchover functionality built in.  There is main server process that runs continuously and can be brought up/down easily.

The $1M question is whether Veritas can be configured so it monitors the heartbit of the application by pinging it and making sure that there is a response and is able to bring spare box to "life" and replace a failed box if needed. 

I appreciate your feedback as it will help me in internal discussion.

Thanks!
Alex

[g_lee]

You should be able to achieve this with Application bundled agent, depending on what you mean by "pinging the heartbeat" of the application.

The Application agent can monitor the application in the following ways:
- Use the monitor program
- Specify a list of processes
- Specify a list of process ID files
- Any combination of the above

eg: iif "pinging the heartbeat" means running an app script/program to probe the application to get a response, then this can be configured as the monitor program

In the event that the monitor detects the application is no longer running (exactly how will depend on which option you choose above), VCS will offline / clean up the application on the failed node, then failover to the standby node.

See the VCS Bundled Agents Reference Guide for further details
PDF for 5.0MP3 (Solaris) here:
http://sfdoccentral.symantec.com/sf/5.0MP3/solaris/pdf/vcs_bundled_agents.pdf

... or html for agent attributes on Solaris here:
http://sfdoccentral.symantec.com/sf/5.0MP3/solaris/html/vcs_bundled_agents/ch_sol_services_app_agents21.html

VCS User's Guide may also be helpful reference (for more details on concepts/terminology, failover behaviour, etc):
http://sfdoccentral.symantec.com/sf/5.0MP3/solaris/pdf/vcs_users.pdf
or
http://sfdoccentral.symantec.com/sf/5.0MP3/solaris/html/vcs_users/index.html

Hope that helps.