Preface

The Oracle Solaris Cluster Concepts Guide contains conceptual information about the Oracle Solaris Cluster product on both SPARC and x86 based systems.

Who Should Use This Book

This document is intended for the following audiences:

• Service providers who install and service cluster hardware

• System administrators who install, configure, and administer Oracle Solaris Cluster software

• Application developers who develop failover and scalable services for applications that are not currently included with the Oracle Solaris Cluster product

To understand the concepts that are described in this book, you should be familiar with the Oracle Solaris operating system and have expertise with the volume manager software that you can use with the Oracle Solaris Cluster product.

You should determine your system requirements and purchase the required equipment and software. The Oracle Solaris Cluster Data Services Planning and Administration Guide contains information about how to plan, install, set up, and use the Oracle Solaris Cluster software.

How This Book Is Organized

The Oracle Solaris Cluster Concepts Guide contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Introduction and Overview provides an overview of the overall concepts that you need to know about Oracle Solaris Cluster.

Chapter 2, Key Concepts for Hardware Service Providers describes the concepts that hardware service providers should understand. These concepts can help service providers understand the relationships between hardware components. These concepts can also help service providers and cluster administrators better understand how to install, configure, and administer cluster software and hardware.

Chapter 3, Key Concepts for System Administrators and Application Developers describes the concepts system administrators and developers who will use the Oracle Solaris Cluster application programming interface (API) should know. Developers can use this API to turn a standard user application, such as a web browser or database, into a highly available data service that can run in the Oracle Solaris Cluster environment.

Related Documentation

Information about related Oracle Solaris Cluster topics is available in the documentation that is listed in the following table. All Oracle Solaris Cluster documentation is available at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/documentation/index.html#sys_sw.

Getting Help

If you have problems installing or using the Oracle Solaris Cluster software, contact your service provider and provide the following information:

• Your name and email address

• Your company name, address, and phone number

• The model and serial numbers of your systems

• The release number of the operating system (for example, the Solaris 10 OS)

• The release number of Oracle Solaris Cluster software (for example, 3.3)

Use the commands in the following table to gather information about your systems for your service provider.

You should also have available the contents of the /var/adm/messages file.

Access to Oracle Support

Oracle customers have access to electronic support through My Oracle Support. For information, visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=info or visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=trs if you are hearing impaired.

Typographic Conventions

The following table describes the typographic conventions that are used in this book.

Table P-1 Typographic Conventions

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows UNIX system prompts and superuser prompts for shells that are included in the Oracle Solaris OS. In command examples, the shell prompt indicates whether the command should be executed by a regular user or a user with privileges.

Table P-2 Shell Prompts