This section describes three different views of the Sun Cluster software and the key concepts and documentation relevant to each view.
These views are typical for the following professionals:
Hardware installation and service personnel
System administrators
Application developers
To hardware service professionals, the Sun Cluster software looks like a collection of off-the-shelf hardware that includes servers, networks, and storage. These components are all cabled together so that every component has a backup and no single point of failure exists.
Hardware service professionals need to understand the following cluster concepts.
Cluster hardware configurations and cabling
Installing and servicing (adding, removing, replacing):
Network interface components (adapters, junctions, cables)
Disk interface cards
Disk arrays
Disk drives
The administrative console and the console access device
Setting up the administrative console and console access device
The following sections contain material relevant to the preceding key concepts:
The Sun Cluster 3.1 - 3.2 Hardware Administration Manual for Solaris OS includes procedures and information that are associated with hardware service concepts.
To the system administrator, the Sun Cluster product is a set of Solaris hosts that share storage devices.
The system administrator sees software that performs specific tasks:
Specialized cluster software that is integrated with Solaris software to monitor the connectivity between Solaris hosts in the cluster
Specialized software that monitors the health of user application programs that are running on the cluster nodes
Volume management software that sets up and administers disks
Specialized cluster software that enables all Solaris hosts to access all storage devices, even those Solaris hosts that are not directly connected to disks
Specialized cluster software that enables files to appear on every Solaris host as though they were locally attached to that Solaris host
System administrators need to understand the following concepts and processes:
The interaction between the hardware and software components
The general flow of how to install and configure the cluster including:
Installing the Solaris Operating System
Installing and configuring Sun Cluster software
Installing and configuring a volume manager
Installing and configuring application software to be cluster ready
Installing and configuring Sun Cluster data service software
Cluster administrative procedures for adding, removing, replacing, and servicing cluster hardware and software components
Configuration modifications to improve performance
The following sections contain material relevant to the preceding key concepts:
The following Sun Cluster documents include procedures and information associated with the system administration concepts:
The Sun Cluster software provides data services for such applications as Oracle, NFS, DNS, Sun Java System Web Server, Apache Web Server (on SPARC based systems), and Sun Java System Directory Server. Data services are created by configuring off-the-shelf applications to run under control of the Sun Cluster software. The Sun Cluster software provides configuration files and management methods that start, stop, and monitor the applications. If you need to create a new failover or scalable service, you can use the Sun Cluster Application Programming Interface (API) and the Data Service Enabling Technologies API (DSET API) to develop the necessary configuration files and management methods that enable its application to run as a data service on the cluster.
Application developers need to understand the following:
The characteristics of their application to determine whether it can be made to run as a failover or scalable data service.
The Sun Cluster API, DSET API, and the “generic” data service. Developers need to determine which tool is most suitable for them to use to write programs or scripts to configure their application for the cluster environment.
The following sections contain material relevant to the preceding key concepts:
The following Sun Cluster documents include procedures and information associated with the application developer concepts: