Linux-HA and Tivoli Storage Manager

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 09:44:38 +0000

Well, since we received part of our shipment on Wednesday, I finally looked at how we’re gonna deploy our active/active Tivoli Storage Manager configuration. Right now, we do have a single pSeries box hosting ~100 client nodes which we’re looking to split by two (since we do have two x366 for that purpose now).

Now, as there ain’t no solution for this scenario yet (neither from International Business Machines nor someone out of the open source community), I sat down and started writing an OCF Resource agent for dsmserv (that is the Tivoli Storage Manager server).

Linux-HA and Tivoli Storage Manager (Finito!)

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:59:07 +0000

As I previously said, I was writing my own OCF resource agent for IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager Server. And I just finished it yesterday evening (it took me about two hours to write this post).

Only took me about four work days (that is roughly four hours each, which weren’t recorded in that subversion repository) plus most of this week at home (which is 10 hours a day) and about one hundred subversion revisions. The good part about it is, that it actually just works :-D (I was amazed on how good actually). Now you’re gonna say, “but Christian, why didn’t you use the included Init-Script and just fix it up, so it is actually compilant to the LSB Standard ?”

The answer is rather simple: Yeah I could have done that, but you also know that wouldn’t have been fun. Life is all about learning, and learn something I did (even if I hit the head against the wall from time to time ;-) during those few days) … There’s still one or two things I might want to add/change in the future (that is maybe next week), like

adding support for monitor depth by querying the dsmserv instance via dsmadmc (if you read through the resource agent, I already use it for the shutdown/pre-shutdown stuff)
I still have to properly test it (like Alan Robertson mentioned in his one hour thirty talk on Linux-HA 2.0 and on his slides, Page 100-102) in a pre-production environment
I’m probably configure the IBM RSA to act as a stonith device ( s hoot t he o ther n ode i n t he h ead) - just for the case one of them ever gets stuck in a case, where the box is still up, but doesn’t react to any requests anymore

Resource-Agent on BAFM

Linux-HA and Tivoli Storage Manager

Linux-HA and Tivoli Storage Manager (Finito!)