We do have some F5 appliances, but I think that's just for network routing--if
there's any kind of F5 that could help manage an HA solution (making a passive
server active or something like that), we don't have them. And we are looking
at Oracle RAC as a possibility for the oracle databases we're hoping to migrate
to zlinux, but the oracle "platform owner" wanted to explore something cheaper
(keeping the critical Oracle stuff that requires RAC on the midrange servers it
currently uses, but looking for some poor-man's HA to at least provide
active-passive support on zlinux). And we tried out the MQ Multi-Instance
setup for our websphere MQ and Broker servers but could never get it working as
advertised, so that'll be another application we'll need to support. Right
now, as I alluded to below, we're just using an active-active cluster (with
routing through an F5 load-balancer) for MQ with each server running off its
own storage--not really what the application owner wants in the long term.
We're also playing with scripted HA for that which would use shared disks
across the servers that would be managed by testing to see if the logical
volume was in use--a really homegrown solution which I think would be more
problematic than LinuxHA.
When you say the setup for LinuxHA is complicated, how bad is it? Did you have
to resort to bugging SuSE for configuration help, or were you able to work it
all through with the documentation on the org site/maybe polling the
interested-users list for it? not that I think we're anywhere near as
knowledgeable as you and your team with zlinux, but if you guys had to go to
the vendor for assistance, we shouldn't even contemplate it! and I just got
word that okay, yeah, we can add LinuxHA to the running for the "generic HA"
solution we're looking to find. (I guess reorgs are good in rare occasions,
such as moving folks obstinate to what seem like good ideas...)
Whatever we come up with would be something we hope could be exploited on all
Linux servers (on any platform) at SunTrust--chances are, it'd only be
cost-effective and training-effective if it was common, and right now, we
actually don't have any standard HA product on our intel Linux side either, so
this'd be a good time to find one. Of course we'd want to support any
"application-specific" HA solution that the applications wanted to pay for (if
it could run on zseries), but we'd like to have some kind of generic option for
those other applications/products that still wanted some way to stay up while
we were IPLing their z/VM lpars.
Thanks for your consideration/responses!
Shannon
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcy
Cortes
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 12:28 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: any good recommendations for an HA tool on zSeries?
Hi Shannon,
We have all kinds of HA going on.
What are your distributed folks doing? Sometimes it is easiest just to use
what they use. Appliances work great (one example is F5's GTM and LTM).
The sw products often have their own solution (i.e. DB2 HADR, Websphere ND,
Oracle RAC) and those are good choices for those products.
We do use some LinuxHA (on SLES for z it is included and supported) for
clustered file systems. It's complicated, but it can do things like provide
r/w file systems to multiple server and move IP addresses around for you.
When you think about just activating an app on another server, does it have
access to the same files?
>From a systems management standpoint, we prefer that our applications run
>active-active (that is send traffic to multiple app servers if possible) to
>use capacity on more than one CEC. IHS in Websphere ND has plugins too where
>you can adjust percentage of traffic to the various app servers. This
>allows us to take whole lpars or CECs out of service for planned maintenance
>as well without much human intervention.
Hope that is helpful.
Marcy
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Collinson.Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 8:03 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [LINUX-390] any good recommendations for an HA tool on zSeries?
We're running RHEL6.2 and RHEL6.4 on our zlinux servers under z/VM 6.2 and so
far have been handling HA by just clustering servers--yeah, any transaction in
process to a server that's gone down would be whacked in mid-air, but anything
new would route to the "cluster-buddy" that was still up. That's not true
high-availability, though, and won't work for all our potential applications.
Of course, we're looking at SSI which will help out for planned outages, but
we'd also like to be able to do something in the case of a server-crash (i.e.
have some sort of heartbeat-monitor that could pop up/activate an application
on a different server if it noticed something was down). We'll be
investigating Tivoli Systems Automation for Multiplatform, and the Sine Nomine
HAO (High Availability Option), plus I intend to see if the RHEL HA add-on is
compatible with zSeries, but I'm wondering if there's any other good products
to explore (as well as anyone's experiences with the above products). We did a
cursory look at LinuxHA, but unfortunately our management is not keen on using
freeware, even though price will definitely be a consideration in whatever we
decide on.
Any comments from those in the field actually exploiting HA for zSeries at
their shops?
Thanks!
Shannon Collinson, SunTrust Bank, Atlanta, GA LEGAL DISCLAIMER The information
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