InfiniBand:

The HP BLc 4X DDR InfiniBand Mezzanine card, which requires the HP BLc 4X DDR IB Switch Module (figure 15), is supported with Serviceguard

Figure 15: HP BLc 4X DDR InfiniBand Mezzanine card and HP BLc 4X DDR IB Switch Module

Considerations for InfiniBand use:

Few applications use native InfiniBand protocol; thus requiring the use of IPoverIB protocol (e.g., Oracle RAC 10g and 11g currently support only IPoverIB), which dramatically increases CPU overhead

If VERITAS CVM or CFS is used, InfiniBand must not be configured as the Serviceguard cluster heartbeat

Using InfiniBand limits the ability to have high availability configurations for the Fibre Channel and Ethernet mezzanine card as the IB interconnect module physically requires two interconnect bay slots

Serviceguard Solutions Portfolio:

The Serviceguard Storage Management Suite, SGeRAC, SGeSAP, and Enterprise Cluster Master Toolkit can be used with HP BladeSystem configurations without any constraints or special considerations

Follow published manuals, release notes and white papers for suggested best practice configurations

HP BladeSystems are supported with all Serviceguard Disaster Recovery solutions (i.e., Extended Distance Serviceguard clusters, Metrocluster, Continentalclusters)

Other Areas to Improve HP BladeSystem Solution Availability:

Consider adding high availability to the Central Management Server. See the white paper titled “Using HP Insight Software from a Highly Available Central Management Server with Microsoft Cluster Service” posted at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/c01956953.pdf for more information.

Also consider configuring the quorum service as a high availability Serviceguard cluster, which is described in the HP Quorum Server documentation posted at http://docs.hp.com/en/ha.html#Quorum%20Server

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