Sun Cluster Geographic Edition Installation Guide

Chapter 1 Planning the Sun Cluster Geographic Edition Installation

This chapter provides planning information and guidelines for installing a Sun Cluster Geographic Edition configuration. This chapter also describes how to plan the data replication between two clusters.

This chapter contains the following sections:

Installation Process

    To successfully install Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software, you must complete the following installation phases:

  1. Planning your installation.

  2. Connecting your hardware.

  3. Installing Sun Cluster software.

  4. Installing data replication products.

  5. Installing and configuring the required software.

  6. Installing Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software.

  7. Configuring Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software.

This installation process progresses from the initial planning phase to the eventual startup of Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software. This guide provides information about phases 1, 6, and 7.


Note –

You can also install Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software at the same time that you install Sun Cluster software.


For information about installing Sun Cluster software, see the Sun Cluster Software Installation Guide for Solaris OS.

For information about configuring a cluster after startup, see the Sun Cluster Geographic Edition System Administration Guide.

Planning Cluster Hardware

This section helps you to plan your hardware for the primary cluster, the secondary cluster, and the inter-cluster communication.

The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition hardware configuration consists of the following elements:

The hardware configurations that Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software supports are identical to the hardware configurations that the Sun Cluster product supports. For use of Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software with storage-based data replication mechanisms, the cluster hardware configurations are those configurations that support the related storage hardware. Partner clusters must be compatibly configured to support data replication between the clusters.

Use of the Sun Cluster Geographic Edition product with Hitachi TrueCopy data replication requires Sun Cluster configurations with Sun StorEdgeTM 9970/9980 Array or Hitachi Lightning 9900 Series storage that supports the Hitachi TrueCopy command interfaces.

Internet access is required between partner clusters. The communication between partner clusters for inter-cluster management operations is through a logical-hostname IP address. The default inter-cluster heartbeat module also communicates through a logical-hostname IP address.

A cluster in a Sun Cluster Geographic Edition partnership conforms to the standard configuration rules of a cluster that is running Sun Cluster software.

Planning Required Software

This section helps you to adapt the configuration of your Sun Cluster software for the installation of Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software. This section also helps you to plan the installation of your data replication software.

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software must be installed on a cluster that is running the Solaris Operating System and the Sun Cluster software. You can install Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software at the same time that you install Sun Cluster software or at any time afterwards. The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software configuration is identical to the Sun Cluster software configuration.

Required Software

The following table lists the required software.

Table 1–1 Required Software

Software 

Version 

Minimum Operating System version

  • Solaris 9 9/05 or Solaris 10 11/06 (SPARC® Platform Edition).

  • Solaris 10 11/06 (x64 Platform Edition).

Sun Cluster software

Sun Cluster 3.2 2/08 

This version includes version 2 of the common agent container that supports the Sun Cluster 3.2 2/08 SunTM Cluster Manager. The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition product uses the same common agent container infrastructure as Sun Cluster Manager.

You must use common agent container 2, which is located in the /usr/sbin directory. Use the /usr/sbin/cacaoadm -V command to check which version of common agent container you are using.

Volume management software 

  • For use with Solaris Volume Manager software:

    • Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software.

  • SPARC: For use with VERITAS Volume Manager software:

    • Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software.

    • Hitachi TrueCopy software.

    • EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software.

Data replication software

  • Sun availability suite software, either Sun StorageTek Availability Suite 4 software on the Solaris 10 OS, or Sun StorEdge Availability Suite 3.2.1 software on the Solaris 9 OS

  • Hitachi TrueCopy RAID Manager/Solaris Version 01–18–03/03 or compatible.

  • EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility SymCLI 6.0.1 and microcode 5671 software.

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition 

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition 3.2 2/08 software 

Planning the Data Replication Software

A cluster that is using Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software with a data replication product is subject to the standard configuration rules of a cluster that is running the data replication product with Sun Cluster software. Partner clusters must have compatible software configurations to support data replication between the clusters.

The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition product supports the following data replication products:

The Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software is a host-based replication method. This method consists of software installed on a host that controls replication from one server to a secondary server.

The Hitachi TrueCopy and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility replication use a storage-based method. These methods use replication that is built into the storage hardware.

If you use Hitachi TrueCopy RAID Manager software or EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software, you must install the software on each node of the cluster.

Planning Resource and Resource Group Names

A partnership requires two clusters to be combined into one environment, and one cluster might be a running production system. Therefore, advance planning of resources and resource groups is essential for a successful installation.

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software requires that resource-group names be identical on each partner cluster to ensure that a resource or resource group can be managed as a single entity across both clusters in the partnership.

Planning Required IP Addresses and Hostnames

You must have all the required IP addresses and hostnames before you begin the installation process. You must set up a number of IP addresses for various Sun Cluster Geographic Edition components, depending on your cluster configuration. Each node in the cluster configuration must have at least one public network connection to the same set of public subnets. You must have an IP address for the cluster name and for each cluster node. You might also need additional IP addresses for data replication products. For more information about requirements for configuring data replication, see the following data replication guides:

See Public Network IP Addresses in Sun Cluster Software Installation Guide for Solaris OS for a list of components that require IP addresses. Add these IP addresses to any naming services that are used. Also add these IP addresses to the local /etc/inet/hosts file on each cluster node after you install Solaris software.

A cluster name must be suitable as a hostname because Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software creates the logical hostname by using the cluster name. Therefore, the cluster name must be in the naming system.

Also, cluster names must be unique. For example, if you have a cluster wholly within the domain .france, you can use hostnames like paris and grenoble. However, if you have a cross-domain cluster, you must specify the hostnames with enough qualification to identify the host on the network. You can link paris and munich with hostnames paris.france and munich.germany, and the cluster names remain paris and munich.

You cannot create a partnership between clusters paris.france and paris.texas because of a collision on the cluster name paris.

Planning the Sun Cluster Geographic Edition Environment

This section provides guidelines for planning and preparing the following components for Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software installation:

Licensing

Ensure that you have available all necessary license certificates before you begin software installation. Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software does not require a license certificate. However, each node that is installed with Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software must be covered under your Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software license agreement.

For licensing requirements for data replication software and application software, see the installation documentation for those products.

Logical Hostnames

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software uses the logical hostname of a cluster for inter-cluster management communication and heartbeat communication. The IP address for a cluster name must be available for Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software to wrap a logical hostname around the IP address when the software is started by using the geoadm start command.

You can use the cluster command to find the name of the cluster when you need to verify that the cluster name is suitable for use as a hostname. To find the name of the cluster, run the following command:


# cluster list

For more information, see the cluster(1CL) man page.