Sun Cluster Data Services Planning and Administration Guide for Solaris OS

Configuration Guidelines for Sun Cluster Data Services

This section provides configuration guidelines for Sun Cluster data services.

Identifying Data Service Special Requirements

Identify requirements for all of the data services before you begin Solaris and Sun Cluster installation. Failure to do so might result in installation errors that require that you completely reinstall the Solaris and Sun Cluster software.

For example, the Oracle Real Application Clusters Guard option of Sun Cluster Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters has special requirements for the hostnames that you use in the cluster. Sun Cluster HA for SAP also has special requirements. You must accommodate these requirements before you install Sun Cluster software because you cannot change hostnames after you install Sun Cluster software.

Note –

Some Sun Cluster data services are not supported for use in x86 based clusters. For more information, see the release notes for your release of Sun Cluster at http://docs.sun.com.

Determining the Location of the Application Binaries

You can install the application software and application configuration files on one of the following locations.

The local disks of each cluster node – Placing the software and configuration files on the individual cluster nodes provides the following advantage. You can upgrade application software later without shutting down the service.

The disadvantage is that you then have several copies of the software and configuration files to maintain and administer.
The cluster file system – If you put the application binaries on the cluster file system, you have only one copy to maintain and manage. However, you must shut down the data service in the entire cluster to upgrade the application software. If you can spare a short period of downtime for upgrades, place a single copy of the application and configuration files on the cluster file system.

For information about how to create cluster file systems, see Planning the Global Devices, Device Groups, and Cluster File Systems in Sun Cluster Software Installation Guide for Solaris OS.
Highly available local file system – Using HAStoragePlus, you can integrate your local file system into the Sun Cluster environment, making the local file system highly available. HAStoragePlus provides additional file system capabilities such as checks, mounts, and unmounts that enable Sun Cluster to fail over local file systems. To fail over, the local file system must reside on global disk groups with affinity switchovers enabled.

For information about how to use the HAStoragePlus resource type, see Enabling Highly Available Local File Systems.

Verifying the `nsswitch.conf` File Contents

The nsswitch.conf file is the configuration file for name-service lookups. This file determines the following information.

The databases within the Solaris environment to use for name-service lookups
The order in which the databases are to be consulted

Some data services require that you direct “group” lookups to “files” first. For these data services, change the “group” line in the nsswitch.conf file so that the “files” entry is listed first. See the documentation for the data service that you plan to configure to determine whether you need to change the “group” line.

For additional information about how to configure the nsswitch.conf file for the Sun Cluster environment, see Planning the Sun Cluster Environment in Sun Cluster Software Installation Guide for Solaris OS.

Planning the Cluster File System Configuration

Depending on the data service, you might need to configure the cluster file system to meet Sun Cluster requirements. To determine whether any special considerations apply, see the documentation for the data service that you plan to configure.

For information about how to create cluster file systems, see Planning the Global Devices, Device Groups, and Cluster File Systems in Sun Cluster Software Installation Guide for Solaris OS.

The resource type HAStoragePlus enables you to use a highly available local file system in a Sun Cluster environment that is configured for failover. For information about setting up the HAStoragePlus resource type, see Enabling Highly Available Local File Systems.

Enabling Solaris SMF Services to Run Under the Control of Sun Cluster

The Service Management Facility (SMF) enables you to automatically start and restart SMF services, during a node boot or service failure. This feature is similar to the Sun Cluster Resource Group Manager (RGM), which facilitates high availability and scalability for cluster applications. SMF services and RGM features are complementary to each other.

Sun Cluster includes three new SMF proxy resource types that can be used to enable SMF services to run with Sun Cluster in a failover, multi-master, or scalable configuration. The SMF proxy resource types enables you to encapsulate a set of interrelated SMF services into a single resource, SMF proxy resource to be managed by Sun Cluster. In this feature, SMF manages the availability of SMF services on a single node. Sun Cluster provides cluster-wide high availability and scalability of the SMF services.

For information on how you can encapsulate these services, see Enabling Solaris SMF Services to Run With Sun Cluster

You might require Sun Cluster to make highly available an application other than NFS or DNS that is integrated with the Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF). To ensure that Sun Cluster can restart or fail over the application correctly after a failure, you must disable SMF service instances for the application as follows:

For any application other than NFS or DNS, disable the SMF service instance on all potential primary nodes for the Sun Cluster resource that represents the application.
If multiple instances of the application share any component that you require Sun Cluster to monitor, disable all service instances of the application. Examples of such components are daemons, file systems, and devices.