HP Serviceguard Metrocluster manual Introduction

1 Introduction

Continentalclusters provides disaster recovery between multiple Serviceguard clusters. A single cluster can act as the recovery for a set of primary clusters. It is also possible to have two clusters act as recovery for each other. This allows increased utilization of hardware resources.

Continentalclusters eliminates the cluster itself as a single point of failure. There is no distance limitation as the cluster hearbeats are restricted to single clusters and the data replication latency can be removed using asynchronous replication.

The Continentalclusters monitoring mechanism periodically verifies the health of the primary clusters that are defined in its configuration. When it detects a change, the mechanism can issue notifications. The notification message and type are configurable. Email, SNMP, OPC and syslogs are the examples of notifications that are supported in Continentalclusters.

The recovery steps to recover an application in a Continentalclusters is completely automated, but the recovery process must be initiated manually. This is termed as “Push-Button” recovery. After the administrator confirms the disaster and runs the recovery command, the recovery process does not require further manual input.

Figure 1 shows a basic s configuration where Site A cluster is defined as a primary cluster and Site B cluster is defined as a recovery cluster.

8Introduction