Clustering Sun: Sun cluster or Veritas?

Any of you have experience with Sun Cluster software and/or Veritas
Cluster?

I have worked with IBMS HACMP but none of the other solutions.  Even
that was fairly simple active/passive clusters, nothing too fancy.

Any pros/cons to running either Suns cluster software or Veritas' on
Sun systems? Probably either V880s or V1280s.  I have been looking at
the docs. on Suns site about Sun Cluster 3.1 but of course that is
just technical info, always best to hear from others with real
experience too :)

TIA.

Hey,

this is an endless discussion. I think, the Sun cluster is
fully integrated in Solaris (8/9/10), the Veritas cluster
has some more features and is easy to administrate.
Im certified on borh clusters, on smaller systems i prefer
Veritas on bigger systems (4800 and up) i prefer Sun cluster.

Best wishes
Klaus Grote
DNS GmbH

Hey,

this is an endless discussion. I think, the Sun cluster is
fully integrated in Solaris (8/9/10), the Veritas cluster
has some more features and is easy to administrate.
Im certified on borh clusters, on smaller systems i prefer
Veritas on bigger systems (4800 and up) i prefer Sun cluster.

Best wishes
Klaus Grote
DNS GmbH

Hey,

this is an endless discussion. I think, the Sun cluster is
fully integrated in Solaris (8/9/10), the Veritas cluster
has some more features and is easy to administrate.
Im certified on borh clusters, on smaller systems i prefer
Veritas on bigger systems (4800 and up) i prefer Sun cluster.

Best wishes
Klaus Grote
DNS GmbH

Why [1] and why [2] ?

przemol

Worked with the older versions of sun cluster, not so familiar with the newer
versions of SUN cluster. Currently running both Veritas Cluster Server 2.0 and
Veritas cluster server 4.0.

Here is my 2 cents...

Sun cluster software must have been designed by some electrical engineer,
especially their heartbeat mechanism with the terminal server between the
multiple hosts,etc..(this is on the old clusters, not sure what it is like on
the new one.)

The overall design of the Veritas Cluster Server is just excellent. The way
their heart beat is designed and the way the hosts in a cluster communicate the
config information and maintain a consistent environment is just amazing. They
have their own proprietary protocol for the heartbeat and configuration
management over the heartbeat links ( LLT and GAB ).

The VCS configuration, is simple and easy to understand and easy to configure.
The administration GUI is excellent. Overall a great product. I have been
running VCS clusters for the last 4 years and have had no trouble with them.

Strongly recommend using VCS. Unless you have a very high end sun system and sun
has integrated some of the hardware failover into the cluster design for the
15K, 10K etc range of systems. I am not familiar with the high end systems and
won't be able to weigh in the benifits of the proprietary integration that sun
has implemented on the higher end systems. ( This is probably the reason why
another gentlemen who posted a reply to your message mentioned using sun cluster
if it is a high end sun system. )

For a 440/880/1280 VCS should kick ass, without any problems.

-Zombie

 

Sun Cluster 3.x is completely different to Sun Cluster 2.x. There are more
differences between the two versions than there are similarities.


The heartbeat stuff, as well as the need to have a terminal server is all
gone with Sun Cluster 3.x


"proprietary integration" ? Cluster on the high-end machines works in
exactly the same way as it does on the lower-end machines. There's nothing
special in the standard hardware or Solaris which acts differently.

There is one specific product which can have an impact on cluster configs,
being the WildCat interconnect boards, but that's an extra which is
just for better performance - it's neither required, built in, or used
in a standard HA cluster config.


Ditto Sun Cluster.

Obviously I'm a bit biased towards SC, and I've never actually run VCS
in anger, but I suspect either will do the job you're after without
any poblems.

Sun Cluster has the advantages of single-vendor support (same vendor
for OS, hardware and cluster) as well as tighter integration with the
OS.  VCS has the advantages of slightly more flexibility (although
this is both an advantage and a disadvantage), cross-platform
administration (but ask yourself if that's really an advantage - it
depends on the environment).

Personally I'd recommend SC3, but like I said, I'm a little biased  -
especially as I've installed 9x 2-node SC3 clusters in the past 2 weeks :)

  Scott.

At the moment being sysadmin for 2x SC3.0 system running on 6800's and also 
busy installing VCS 4.0 on 2xV480.
I like VCS much more, resource dependecies are much clearer in VCS, 
installation is easier, GUI's are better (for those that use GUI's). AFAIK 
you can download them both. Just pick 2 old machines and cluster them and 
see what you like best. If you can't download Veritas, contact them or a 
reseller and they can give you an evaluation version.

Good luck in choosing,

Marc