Advantages:

∙Protects against a complete blade enclosure failure

∙Provides the flexibility of moving workloads to another enclosure for planned maintenance (e.g., Virtual Connect and / or Onboard Administrator firmware upgrades that require all blades in the enclosures to be shutdown)

∙Internal cluster heartbeat network can be configured using Virtual Connect stacking links connected between the Virtual Connect interconnect modules and different enclosures to eliminate additional network cabling and switches

∙Provides consistent management of server profiles using Virtual Connect or Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager when all cluster nodes are in blade enclosures

Other Considerations:

∙Additional cost for a 2nd blade enclosure or other non-blade cluster nodes

∙A quorum server outside of the enclosure is required for this configuration

∙Configurations must have exactly half of the cluster nodes in an enclosure, complex (e.g., nPar, vPar) and/or other combination of external servers

Additional Considerations for using Serviceguard with the HP BladeSystem

The following is a list of the major recommendations covered in this white paper and additional points to consider when configuring HP BladeSystem solutions with Serviceguard to maximize application availability:

HP BladeSystem Enclosures and Internal Storage:

∙Ensure the firmware versions on all blade servers, Mezzanine cards, interconnect cards and Onboard Administrators are consistent and current within an enclosure participating in the Serviceguard cluster and VC domain to ensure reliable application failover

∙Since some Virtual Connect and Onboard Administrator firmware upgrades require all blades within the enclosure to be down, it is recommended to configure Serviceguard clusters between enclosures and failover applications before performing enclosure firmware upgrades or other planned enclosure maintenance

∙The SB40c Storage Blade is not supported for use as Serviceguard shared storage

∙The Internal disks in a server blade cannot be used for Serviceguard shared storage; however they can be used as boot/root disks with either MirrorDisk/UX or the embedded RAID controller for data redundancy

Ethernet Connectivity:

∙The 10/100 Base-T iLO port on the c-Class BladeSystem Enclosure cannot be used in the Serviceguard cluster configuration or with Serviceguard relocatable IP addresses

∙LAN on Motherboard (LOM) ports are supported with Serviceguard; however for Serviceguard to reliably detect a LOM port failure on BL860c “A” version and BL870c blades, the Serviceguard cluster configuration must have the NETWORK_FAILURE_DETECTION parameter set to INONLY_OR_INOUT (the default for this parameter is INOUT)

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