Hello ,
Sorry for this very late summary due to a very busy month of july (work,
holidays, world cup...).
I was a little surprised that nobody answer about SUN product HA
Cluster.
Maybe it's because it' s a young product not yet widely installed.
I may conclude from all your answers about HA+ and Firstwatch that both
are rather good products
Both of them share the same origin and provide roughly the same
features.
They are now distinct products and evolve independantly, so may provide
some specific features (GUI, configuration tools...)
Both seems to be well established, reliable, solid.
All of you who are using one of these products seem between rather and
very satisfied.
Even if many of you agree that these products are rather easy to
configure and implement, you recommend to pay for consulting services
for the installation and configuration step.
users of HA+ like :
it's easy configuration and implementation, it's reliability.
some extra functionnalities
it's java based GUI
users of Firstwatch like :
it's natural integration with VM and VxFS (SRFS)
it's modularity, reliability
Support :
opinions vary from "not what it should be" to "good" for both products.
It seems that most of the problems of support were encountered during
the Qualix/Veritas spliting.
Nobody reports problem that should be caused by having two different
hotlines (SUN and the HA software vendor one).
Veritas would even have a cooperative support agreement with SUN (for
the US zone at least), in order to allow customers to get a single
support contact.
Your answers really confirmed me that HA+ and Firstwatch were both good
candidates to solve my problem.
My conclusion is that I should look at and test both products.
I'am a bit surprised that nobody really answered about SUN HA Cluster
solution.
Most of those who answered about the other products said that SUN
solution should be a valuable one but nobody got a real experience of
it.
Since we've begun testing it, and will probably test HA+ and Firstwatch
too, I should be able to really compare all the three solutions soon.
Feel free to email me your questions if your are interested in such a
study.
Thanks to :
Jay Morgan <jmorgan@qualix.com>
Stefan Jon Silverman <sjs@sjsinc.com>
Shankar.Kanabiran <shankar.kanabiran@ac.com>
Matti Siltanen <matti@fugue.jpl.nasa.gov>
Rick Reineman <reineman1@llnl.gov>
Bill Kamps <wdkamps@srp.gov>
Glenn Richards <Glenn.Richards@yellowcorp.com>
Kevin Sheehan <Kevin Sheehan@uniq.com.au>
Korese Roger B.A <rogerk@veritas.com>
Seth Rothenberg <SROTHENB@montefiore.org>
Denvers, Simon C <DenveSC@europe.stortek.com>
Regards,
Cyril
>Hi gurus,
>
>We'll have to deploy several two nodes HA configurations with the
>following components :
> servers : E3x00 ( E450 or E4000 eventually coming)
> stockage : A5000
> OS : 2.5.1 or 2.6 + volume manager 2.5 + VxFS 3.2
> software : software packages, oracle or sybase databases
>
>We are looking for feed back about the different HA management software
>for them in order to choose one of them.
>
>We tried some months ago to set up the SUN solution on one HA
>configuration but experienced some diffculties. We finally started this
>HA configuration with no particular software management but some scripts
>of ours.
>
>This test of HA cluster software solution had not been made in the best
>conditions :
> - this was a pre FCS version of the 2.1 software
> - we did not have much time to test it
> - we did not have much man power to put on this project
>
>Even if this setting up of SUN HA cluster was not really sucessful, I
>think for the reasons given above that we should not eliminate it from
>the possible solutions to our problem.
>
>Nevertheless, given these difficultites encountered and the evolution of
>stake (we are no more looking for a solution to one specific need but a
>standard solution for the about 10 clusters coming), we are going to
>start a larger study and evaluate the different solutions available
>without necessary take the default SUN solution.
>
>The different software we are aware of are :
>
>- SUN HA Cluster :
> I think like every new product that it may be a little unstable and
>will need some months to have its major bugs corrected.
> It's main advantage, is that SUN supports it directly and commit
>themselves about availability.
> It seems to get rather complete functionalities.
>- VERITAS FirstWatch
> We've not yet seen the product but are rather confident about Veritas
>product, their robustness, their quality and their ease to use since we
>widely use Volume Manager and VxFS.
> The fact that all the product allowing the HA service (VM, VFS and FW)
>would come from the same vendor should be a rather good thing.
> The fact that SUN don't support FirstWatch maybe a problem as it's
>never simple to get a problem solved when several vendors are involved.
>
> As we've not tested it yet we've no other feeling about it.
>
>- Qualix HA+ :
> We've no feeling about it, we don't know the product at all, have not
>yet taken any comercial contact and have very few feed back about it.
> All we know is that this product is recommended by several of our
>software packages furnishers. So it seems to be a rather reliable
>product and a good candidat.
>
>Thanks for your feedback, remarks or suggestion about any of this HA
>cluster software that will be greatly appreciated and of course
>summarised.
>
>Cyril
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:45 CDT