Setting up an AIX HA-CMP High Availability test Cluster

This post will be divided into this common view part, and (the first in this blog) "click here for more" part.

The main reason I’ve created this blog was to document, both for myself and other technical persons, the acts required to perform set tasks.

My first idea was to document how to install HACMP on AIX. For those of you who do not know what I’m talking about, HACMP is a general-purpose high availability cluster made by IBM, which can work on AIX, and if I’m not mistaken, on other platforms as well. It is based, actually, on a large set of "event" scripts, which run in a predefined order.

Unlike other HA clusters, this is a fixed-order cluster. You can bring your application up after the disk has been up, and after IP has been up. You cannot change this predefined order, and you have no freedom to set this order. Unless.

Unless you create custom scripts, and use them as pre-event and post-event, naming them correctly and putting them in the right directories.

This is not an easy cluster to manage. It has no flashy features, it is not versatile like other HA Clusters are (VCS being the best one, to my opinion, and MSCS, despite its tendency to reach race conditions, is quite versatile itself).

It is a hard HA Cluster, for a hard working people. It is meant for a single method of operation, and for a single track of mind. It is rather stable, if you don’t go around adding volumes to VGs (know what you want before you do it.

Below is a step by step list of actions to do, based on my work experience. I’ve brought up two clusters (four nodes) while actually doing copy-paste into a text document of every action done by me, any package installed, etc.

It is meant for test purposes. It is not as HA as it could be (using the same network infrastructure), it doesn’t employ all heart-bit connections it might have had – it’s meant for lab purposes, and has done quite well there.

It was installed on P5 machines, P510, if I’m not mistaken, using FastT200 (single port) for shared storage (single logical drive, small size – about 10GB), with Storage Manager 8.2 and adequate firmware.