Introduction

The HP UX Cluster delivers high availability (HA) by providing fault tolerance, enabling scalability, and supporting disaster recovery for mission-critical applications. It uses HPE Serviceguard developed by Hewlett-Packard developed to implement this clustering solution specifically for the HP-UX operating system.

The HP UX Cluster primarily ensures continuous service availability by detecting hardware, software, or network failures, failing over resources to alternate nodes with in the cluster.

Key components of HP UX Cluster

The architecture of an HP UX Cluster comprises various essential components that work together to provide high availability and resource management.

Cluster Nodes- These are individual servers running the HP-UX operating system. Each node can host applications and resources or act as a failover node. Nodes are assigned roles such as active (primary) and standby (secondary) for specific applications, ensuring continuity in case of failure.

Cluster Software (Serviceguard)- This is the core clustering software responsible for managing communication between nodes and handling failovers. It primarily monitors the health of nodes and services, manages cluster resources such as applications, IP addresses, and storage, and orchestrates failover during node or service failure.

Package (Service Group)- This is a group of resources that defines an application or service that can run on one or more nodes. It typically includes floating IP addresses, applications, and shared storage. If the primary node hosting a package fails, the package can move to another node to maintain service availability.

Shared Storage- This is accessible by multiple nodes in the cluster and is used for hosting application data or shared filesystems. It is managed using volume management tools like LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and primarily ensures data consistency during node failovers.

Key Features of HP UX Clusters

High Availability- HP UX Clusters reduce downtime. If a node fails, another takes over automatically.
Scalability- You can add more nodes or resources as needed.
Disaster Recovery- Clusters can be set up across locations.
Flexible Resource Allocation- Applications or services can run on any node.

Use Cases

Discovery

• It discovers the HP UX Cluster (Running cluster software as Serviceguard) components.
• Publishes relationships between resources to have a topological view and ease of maintenance.
• For more information on Heirarchy of HP-UX resource structure, see Resource Hierarchy

Monitoring

• Provides metrics related to job scheduling time and status and so on.
• Generates concern alerts for each metric to notify the administrator regarding the issue with the resource.
• For a complete list of supported metrics and details on the default monitoring configurations, see Supported Metrics and Default Monitoring Configuration

Supported Target Versions

• HP UX Cluster: Installed Cluster Software
  Serviceguard Manager version: B.03.00
  Serviceguard version: A.11.20.00
  
• HP-UX OS Version: HP-UX rxb10u02 B.11.31 U ia64 3148622491 unlimited-user license

Resource Hierarchy

The following is the resource hierarchy for HP UX Cluster.
    • HP UX Cluster
          • HP UX Server
          • HP UX Resource Group

The following is the resource hierarchy for HP-UX Server.
    • HP UX Server

Version History