One of the best features included in the Oracle VM server for SPARC 2.1 version was live migration. Live migration enables migrating active LDOMs from one physical system to other without any downtime. This may help you in doing any maintenance activity like patching or hardware changes on the physical server also helps in load balancing between 2 servers. Live Migration phases Phase 1 : Pre-checks In this phase the source machine does pre-checks on the target system to ensure that the … [Read more...] about LDOM live migration basics explained
How to clone LDOMs using ZFS
The ZFS snapshot and cloning feature can be used to clones LDOMs. This comes very handy when you need to create multiple ldoms with some softwares already installed. The steps involved are : 1. Setup the primary domain 2. Create a guest LDOM (base LDOM) 3. Unconfigure, stop and unbind the base LDOM 4. Take zfs snapshot of base LDOM (called as golden image) 5. Clone the golden image to create new LDOMs Setup the primary domain Setup the primary domain with necessary resources and … [Read more...] about How to clone LDOMs using ZFS
How to create and configure solaris 10 zones
Solaris zones enables a software partitioning of solaris 10 OS to support multiple independent, secure OS environments to run in the same OS. Each environment has separate process space, resource allocation and users. Zones are widely used in production environments as it is easy to setup and doesn't require any special hardware like ldoms does. Zone types Global zone - every installed OS acts like a global zone, which is present by default. All non-global zones can only be intalled, … [Read more...] about How to create and configure solaris 10 zones
How to install and configure LDOMs (Oracle VM for SPARC)
Virtualization has been a need of time over several past years as we have machines now even with 16 cores and memory in TBs. A single machine is now capable of accommodating even more than 100 VMs at a time. Oracle VM for SPARC formerly known as LDOMs has played a key role in oracles virtualization strategies and is improving with every version. Before start configuring our first oracle VM for SPARC let us understand types of ldoms, ldom services and virtual devices. Types of logical … [Read more...] about How to install and configure LDOMs (Oracle VM for SPARC)
How to add/remove Low/High priority LLT links in VCS online
It’s sometimes a requirement to add a new high or low priority link to the existing LLT links. This can be done online without affecting any of the cluster services. There are 2 ways to do the same online (without offlining any service group). 1. Method 1 (using lltconfig) 2. Method 2 (editing /etc/llttab and restarting VCS using -force option) 1. Method 1 (using lltconfig) Add/Remove High Priority LLT link To add a high priority LLT link online (without restarting LLT) : # lltconfig … [Read more...] about How to add/remove Low/High priority LLT links in VCS online
How to add a node to an active VCS cluster
There might be a requirement to add a new node to an existing VCS cluster to increase the cluster capacity. Another situation in which there is a need to add a new node is hardware upgrade of the nodes. In this post, we will be adding 3rd node (node03) to the existing 2 node cluster. Install and configure VCS on the new node Install VCS cluster software to node03. When asked to configure it, select "no". After you have finished installing the vcs software run installsf from the software … [Read more...] about How to add a node to an active VCS cluster
How to remove a node from an active VCS cluster
There might be situations when you want to remove a node from cluster. We can do this online without interrupting the cluster services. For this you should have sufficient resources to handle the load of the node which you are going to remove from the cluster. We will be removing node03 with service group SG03 running on it. Freeze node and halt VCS Freeze the node03 and stop VCS on that node by evacuating it, so that service group SG03 will switch over to either node01 or node02. # … [Read more...] about How to remove a node from an active VCS cluster
How to configure VCS I/O fencing – Command line and installer utility
I/O fencing is one of the very important feature of VCS and provides user the data integrity required. Let us now see how we can configure fencing in a VCS setup. This setup assumes that you already have a VCS setup up and running without fencing. Fencing can be configured in 2 ways - By using the installer script and by using command line. Before configuring the disks for fencing you can run a test to confirm whether they are SCSI3-PGR compatible disks. The vxfentsthdw script guides you … [Read more...] about How to configure VCS I/O fencing – Command line and installer utility
vcs basics – Communication faults, jeopardy, split brain, I/O fencing
Let us now see various communication faults that can occur in the VCS cluster and how VCS engine reacts to these fault. There are basically 2 types of communication failures 1. Single LLT link failure (jeopardy) When a node in the cluster has only the last LLT link intact, the node forms a regular membership with other nodes with which it has more than one LLT link active and a Jeopardy membership with the node with which it has only one LLT link active. So as shown in the digram below node03 … [Read more...] about vcs basics – Communication faults, jeopardy, split brain, I/O fencing
VCS cluster 101 – Cluster Communications, GAB, LLT, HAD
GAB, LLT and HAD forms the basic building blocks of vcs functionality. I/O fencing driver on top of it provides the required data integrity. Before diving deep into the topic lets see some basic components of VCS which contribute to the communication stack of VCS. LLT - LLT stands for low latency transport protocol. The main purpose of LLT is to transmit heartbeats. - GAB determines the state of a node with the heartbeats sent over the LLTs. - LLTs are also used to distribute the inter … [Read more...] about VCS cluster 101 – Cluster Communications, GAB, LLT, HAD