SFHA Solutions 6.2: VCS support for SmartIO
The SmartIO feature on Linux was introduced in Storage Foundation and High Availability (SFHA) 6.1. Beginning in this release, SmartIO is also supported on AIX and Solaris.SmartIO enables data efficiency on your solid state drives (SSDs) through I/O caching. For information about administering SmartIO, see the Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions SmartIO for Solid State Drives Solutions Guide. In an SFHA environment, applications can failover to another node. On AIX, Linux, and Solaris, beginning in this release,the SFCache agent allows you to enable caching for an application if there are caching devices.The SFCache agent also allows you to failover the application to a node that does not have caching devices. The SFCache agent monitors: Read caching for Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) cache Read and writeback caching for Veritas File System (VxFS) cache For volume-level caching, the cache objects are disk groups and volumes. For file system level caching, the cache object is the mount point. You can: Modify the caching mode at runtime Set the default caching mode when you mount the VxFS file system Configure the MountOpt attribute of the Mount agent to specify the default caching mode using the smartiomode option For more information about the smartiomode option, see the mount_vxfs(1m) manual page. If the cache faults, the application still runs without any issues on the same system, but with degraded I/O performance.You can configure the SFCache agent’s CacheFaultPolicy attribute and choose to either ignore or initiate failover. If SmartIO is not enabled on a node, the SFCache resource acts as a dummy resource and is reported as ONLINE or OFFLINE depending on the group state, but caching-related operations are not performed. For more information, see: SFCache agent Mount agent Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability documentation for other releases and platforms can be found on the SORT website.SFHA Solutions 6.2 (AIX and Solaris): SmartIO: support for caching on SSD
Introduced in Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions (SFHA) 6.1 on Linux, the SmartIO feature is now available on AIX and Solaris in the SFHA 6.2 release. SmartIO enables the effective use of your solid-state drives through data caching. SmartIO improves application performance by caching frequently accessed data, which maximizes the number of application Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) that can be performed. SmartIO reduces the number of I/Os that must be sent to the back-end storage, which frees up back-end storage resources and improves overall throughput. SmartIO supports read and writeback caching for Veritas File System (VxFS) file systems mounted on Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) volumes, in several caching modes and configurations. SmartIO also supports block-level read caching for applications running on VxVM volumes. For more information on the SmartIO caching modes and configurations, see: Read caching for applications running on VxVM volumes Read caching for applications running on VxFS file systems Writeback caching for applications running on VxFS file systems Caching for databases running on VxFS file systems Caching for databases running on VxVM volumes To use SmartIO, you set up a cache area on the target device. You can do this task simply with one command, while the application is online. SmartIO leverages SFHA Solutions' knowledge of the workload characteristics to determine what data is cached and how that data gets removed from the cache. You can also add advisory information, to customize which data is cached. For information about administering SmartIO, see the Symantec™ Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions SmartIO for Solid State Drives Solutions Guide. The following describe key administrative tasks for the SmartIO feature: Creating a cache area Displaying information about a cache area Enabling or disabling caching for a data object Pausing caching from a volume to a cache area Setting or changing the caching mode Flushing dirty data from a writeback cache area Viewing the SmartIO cache statistics For more information on SmartIO, see the following Symantec Connect articles: SmartIO Read caching demo sfcache demo - VxVM caching The SmartAssist tool is available for Solaris and Linux to assess the optimal size of the SmartIO cache for your environment. https://sort.symantec.com/data_collectors Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability documentation for other releases and platforms can be found on the SORT website.
Symantec ApplicationHA 6.2: Monitoring applications with Intelligent Monitoring Framework
Symantec ApplicationHA 6.2: Monitoring applications with Intelligent Monitoring Framework Introduced in this release, the Intelligent Monitoring Framework (IMF) feature improves ApplicationHA efficiency with: Faster detection of application faults Ability to monitor a large number of application components, with minimal effect on performance IMF is automatically enabled, if you use the Symantec High Availability Wizard to configure an application for monitoring. The feature was introduced in ApplicationHA 6.1 for Windows. In ApplicationHA 6.2, it is extended to AIX, Linux, and Solaris. For details, see the following topics: How intelligent monitoring works:AIX,Linux (KVM), Linux (VMware), andSolaris. Enabling debug logs for IMF:AIX,Linux (KVM),Linux (VMware), andSolaris. Gathering IMF information for support analysis:AIX,Linux (KVM),Linux (VMware), andSolaris. This release introduces IMF support for the folloing ApplicationHA agents: Apache HTTP Server DB2 Database (not applicable to Oracle VM Server for SPARC environment) Oracle Database Generic (custom) applications The following topics describe how to use the Symantec High Availability wizard to configure each supported application for IMF-enabled monitoring: Configuring application monitoring for Apache:AIX,Linux (KVM),Linux (VMware), andSolaris. Configuring application monitoring for DB2:AIX,Linux (KVM),and(Linux (VMware). Configuring application monitoring for Oracle:AIX,Linux (KVM),(Linux (VMware), andSolaris. Configuring application monitoring for generic applications:AIX,Linux (KVM),(Linux (VMware), andSolaris. You can use Symantec Cluster Server (VCS) commands to perform more advanced IMF actions. ApplicationHA and VCS documentation is available on the SORTwebsite.