HPE Serviceguard for Linux

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 27/07/2018 · Updated 04/04/2019

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What’s HPE Serviceguard for Linux

HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX), a high availability(HA) and disaster recovery (DR) clustering solution, increases uptime for your critical applications by protecting them from a multitude of infrastructure and application faults across physical or virtual environments over any distance. It reduces the impact of unplanned downtime with no compromise on data integrity and performance. Furthermore, it helps achieve near zero planned downtime for maintenance.

HPE Serviceguard for Linux is a high availability clustering software designed to protect applications and services from planned and unplanned downtime.

HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX) ensures 24×7 application availability by continuously monitoring the health of the infrastructure and other resources impacting availability of the workload or service within a cluster. It packages an application with its associated resources and moves the package automatically to other server (nodes) in the cluster in the event of a failure that affects any the resources required by the protected workloads. Packages can also be moved manually to perform system maintenance or upgrades. SGLX quickly responds to failures such as those that affect the server, storage, network, SAN & LAN connectivity, processes, memory, disk, operating environments, and more.

HPE Serviceguard for Linux includes out-of-the-box Integration called Toolkits for several popular enterprise grade applications to enable quick integration of such complex applications into a Serviceguard cluster. The Application Integration Toolkit portfolio includes integration for business software and databases like SAP HANA, S/4 HANA, NetWeaver, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Db2 among others. SGLX also offers Toolkits for open source applications and databases like NFS, My SQL, Postgres, Apache, and Tomcat among others which are available at no charge.

In addition to high availability within a data center, Serviceguard for Linux offers a powerful and comprehensive suite of disaster recovery (DR) solutions. SGLX provides a choice of both fully automatic and push button recovery solutions that are tightly integrated with several array based, host based and Database native replication technologies.

HPE Serviceguard Key Features

Fast Failover and Protection in the Data Center

HPE Serviceguard for Linux monitors the availability of critical resources and applications, and provides fast failover in the event of a failure, in as little as 4 seconds without comprising on data integrity.

Combined with HPE Serviceguard Extension for SAP, it reduces the need for manual intervention and downtime in case of unplanned and planned failures for critical SAP HANA® databases.

4X faster deployment, reduces setup time from days to hours with 93% reduction in setup time. HPE Serviceguard for Linux offers out-of-box integration for several applications that enables easy deployment with no added customizations.

Achieves higher uptime in virtual environments with application failovers rather than virtual machine restarts. HPE Serviceguard for Linux supports VMware® and KVM hypervisors.

Monitors the availability of applications, services, databases, and platforms over distances, while protecting against outages and reducing downtime during planned maintenance windows.

Stay Available During Site Outages

HPE Serviceguard for Linux disaster recovery (DR) solution keeps your application online even after the loss of a data center over any distance (providing) with a choice (range) of responses from fully automatic failover to push button recovery.

Fully automatic recovery for complex, scale-out workloads like HANA using site aware disaster tolerant architecture (SADTA) that provides robustness, resiliency and availability for your applications and services.

Offers a suite of disaster recovery solutions for different choice points based on distance, data replication and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) RPO/RTO to fulfill a wide array of conditions.

Reduces capital expenditure with flexible deployment models that allows for minimal reduced investment and enables consolidation of standby resources.

Near Zero Downtime Maintenance

HPE Serviceguard for Linux offers a Live Application Detach (LAD) feature that allows you to do maintenance of the HPE Serviceguard cluster infrastructure (including the heartbeat network) with almost zero downtime.

Rolling upgrades enable upgrade of infrastructure components, operating system, and applications with reduced downtime.

No Compromise Data Integrity and Easy Administration

HPE Serviceguard for Linux delivers proven algorithms and superior arbitration mechanisms providing high levels of availability, data integrity and reliability.

Offers efficient fault detection capabilities that automatically failover critical applications to safer nodes and that resume normal operations without compromising data integrity.

Allows users you to visually configure, monitor, manage, and administer a cluster and its components (such as nodes or packages). Intuitive color-coded icons quickly identify problems with the cluster so user you can quickly react and resolve issues.

HPE Serviceguard Editions

The HPE Serviceguard for Linux portfolio is now available in three easy to order editions to keep you protected:

Base Edition: HPE Serviceguard for Linux Base Edition is the basic product in the Serviceguard solution portfolio—offering automatic and robust application failover, while preserving data integrity. It includes toolkits to deploy popular open source and Linux standard services, and allows for scalability and consolidation, as you can configure large clusters with up to 32 nodes.

Advanced Edition: HPE Serviceguard for Linux Advanced Edition is well suited for customers who want to integrate enterprise applications such as Oracle, SAP, SQL Server into a HPE Serviceguard for Linux cluster with ease. It provides zero scripting out-of-box integration for popular databases and business software like SAP NetWeaver, Oracle DB, Sybase, SQL Server 2017 on Linux, IDB Db2 and EnterpriseDB. The toolkits also provides tried and tested monitors for all the critical application and database components. This helps customer achieve greatly reduced setup time with assured robustness. Furthermore, HPE SGLX Advanced Edition provides multi cluster management capabilities, so you can easily manage all your SGLX clusters from a single pane.
Enterprise Edition: HPE Serviceguard for Linux Enterprise Edition brings in disaster recovery capability and is ideal for customers who want to protect their applications against site outages up to any distance where the round trip network latency is no more than 200 ms. This edition provides automatic, bi-directional failover and failback across data centers up to several hundred kilometers/miles apart. Both data centers protected by Enterprise Edition can be active, protected and capable of providing application failover for each other.

HPE Serviceguard Toolkits and Extensions for Linux

Enterprise applications and databases can be very complex, and appropriate handling when those services crash, hang, or restart is critical to rapid and transparent recovery. HPE Serviceguard Toolkits and Extensions for Linux greatly simplify and accelerate the integration of complex applications into a standardized and proven framework. They handle initial integration of these applications into a cluster as well as provide ongoing monitoring, failover, and failback operations of the clustered application. This means you get it done right and faster—and save up to 93 percent on time and effort versus doing it yourself.

HPE Serviceguard Extension for SAP for Linux (SGeSAP): This extension automates and accelerates SAP application failover while preventing transaction and data loss. It greatly simplifies the setup of SAP environments by automatically discovering SAP applications and auto-populating configuration parameters. For the HPE ConvergedSystem portfolio for SAP HANA, SGeSAP also enables unattended HA/DR database cluster failover capabilities based on SAP HANA system replication technology. This solution eliminates the need for complex manual recovery procedures and minimizes unplanned downtime in the case of a component outage within the HPE ConvergedSystem portfolio for SAP HANA. Recent addition includes 64-node scalability (32 node per site) for SAP HANA scale-out deployments and Support of VMware for HANA scale-out deployments on VMware for HANA supported storage and server blocks.
HPE Serviceguard Toolkit for SAP Sybase ASE and SAP Sybase Replication Server for Linux: Allows you to achieve near continuous database access. Critical business applications and sensitive data transactions are maintained in the event of unexpected system failures and scheduled downtime. Client connections and database operations can instantly move from one server to the other without interruption to end-users.
HPE Serviceguard Toolkit for MS SQL Server 2017: Protect your critical SQL Server workloads against a multitude of failures through out-of-the-box integration for Failover Cluster Instance and Always On Availability Groups.
- With Failover Cluster Instance solution, SGLX provides instance-level protection combined with a reliable shared storage infrastructure.
- With Availability Groups support, SGLX provides database level protection for applications using SQL Server. It enables an integrated set of options including resource management, health monitoring and failure detection, as well as fast, automatic and manual failover of a logical group of databases.
HPE Serviceguard Toolkit for Oracle: Ensure availability of your critical Oracle database workloads. Provides functionality for starting, stopping, monitoring and recovery of Oracle database services in a clustered environment.
- Recover Oracle single databases where data is hosted on shared storage and recovery is achieved through automatic failover of database instance to standby cluster nodes.
- Oracle ASM Mirroring based Extended Distance Cluster solution where the data is replicated between the clusters nodes using ASM Mirroring. SGLX manages both the database, mirroring and performs RPO sensitive automatic failover.
HPE Serviceguard Oracle Data Guard Toolkit: Recover your Oracle database in a matter of minute. Manages Oracle database and Oracle Data Guard replication to perform RPO sensitive automatic role management (failover) and recover from failures.

Toolkit for IBM Db2: Protect IBM Db2 single instance database and associated components from unplanned and planned downtime as well as built-in monitoring capabilities to check system resources like network, volume groups, and file systems.
Toolkit for EnterpriseDB PPAS for Linux: Provides failover capability as well as built-in monitoring capabilities to check system resources like network, volume groups, and file systems.
Contributed Toolkits: Available at no charge, these toolkits are developed and designed by HPE to speed cluster integration of popular Linux applications including Apache, NFS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Samba, Tomcat, and Sendmail.

Developer’s Toolbox: Enables independent software vendors and customers to develop their own toolkits quickly through the use of standard HPE-developed and supported templates.

HPE SGLX DR Offerings

HPE Serviceguard for Linux provides a rich suite of DR offerings based on multiple replication technologies to suit different needs and environments.

Extended Distance Cluster (XDC): Entry level DR offering where the data is replicated between the primary and secondary data centers using host based replication software’s such as LVM, VxVM and MD Raid Mirroring. SGLX monitors and manages the application and the underlying replication to provide RPO sensitive automatic, bi-directional recovery.

Metrocluster (MC): Provides automatic, bi-directional failover and failback across data centers up to several hundred kilometers/miles apart (up to any distance where the round trip network latency is no more than 200 ms). The data is replicated between the primary and secondary data centers using array based replication (3PAR remote copy, EMC SRDF, XP & EVA continuous access). Serviceguard monitors and manages both the application and the underlying replications to provide contextual RPO sensitive recovery
Continentalclusters (CC): DR solution that can stretched across unlimited distance, provides push button automated recovery and cluster level redundancy. In case of failure of the primary data center the entire cluster is recovered in the secondary data center. Provides many to one recovery capabilities with ultimate flexibility of using any replication technology for data replication.