HP-UX 11i Systems Administration Handbook and Toolkit (2nd Edition)

About MC/ServiceGuard

MC/ServiceGuard is a High Availability (HA) application. It is used in conjunction with other HA techniques to produce a loosely coupled cluster. An application running on a primary system is run on a backup system should a failure or other switch over condition exist on the primary system. MC/ServiceGuard can detect failures of a CPU, LAN, application, and other components .

All of the systems as well as all of the application packages have IP addresses. When a failure occurs the backup system runs the high availability package and the IP address of the package moves with the package to the backup system. If only a LAN card fails in a primary system ServiceGuard will fail over to a standby LAN card rather than the backup system.

You can have many systems in a ServiceGuard cluster, all of which can be active. You don't need to have systems in a standby state waiting for a failure to occur.

In the upcoming sections we'll cover ServiceGuard background and then setup a simple ServiceGuard cluster and application from one of the HP Education Center training courses.