Friday Feb 29, 2008
Friday Feb 29, 2008
While providing a secure remote access to cluster information and manageability, SCM also provides real-time cluster objects status in the form of events. If you have Java enabled on your browser, you should be able to see the state changes on the cluster without requiring to click on any part of the web-page. You can also register for SNMP events for any state changes using Sun Cluster Manager. Sun Cluster comes with an event MIB, which, when enabled, automatically sends SNMP trap notifications to the hosts that you specify. Because clusters generate numerous event notifications, only events with a severity of warning or greater are sent as trap notifications.
Any operation in SCM shows the equivalent commands. This increases the familiarity of the user with the command line interface. SCM comes with pictorial views of the cluster. Each cluster object, in its status page, is accompanied by a "Topology" tab, which gives admins the pictorial view of the respective object. SCM also displays the entire cluster view. In case you are interested in looking into the system logs for cluster messages, you can go to the "System Log" tab in SCM where all the cluster messages are filtered for you.
With SCM, admins will be able to create resource groups and resources with the click of a few buttons. Admins can also manage resources and resource groups. You can take a resource group offline, put it in maintenance mode, bring it online, re-master it, suspend or resume it, and do many more operations. You can also set per-node properties for a resource in SCM. This might be very helpful just in case you are not very comfortable setting these properties using the command line interface. SCM can get you started on this.
SCM also allows admins to add/remove/enable/disable adapters, switches and cables. It is also possible to manage quorum devices and configure a quorum server. You can also add NAS devices to Sun Cluster using the NAS wizards. Admins can instrument device groups and disks or modify their properties using SCM. Any operation in SCM will generate an event and will result in an automatic update of the page concerned.
With Sun Cluster 3.2, configuring Data Services has become very simple and all it takes is just a few clicks on the browser. SCM 3.2 has a Tasks page, which lists all the Data Services Wizards that are readily available with Sun Cluster. This list has been selected based on customer feedback and the most frequently configured Data Services. A basic knowledge of Sun Cluster would suffice to use these wizards and that was one of the goals behind the design of these wizards. As you read more about these "magical" wizards here, you will notice that these wizards do the most of autodiscovery for you and all that they might ask you to do is "click" on the desired button.
With the Service Level Management feature in Sun Cluster, admins will be able to view CPU, memory, swap and network utilization of resource groups and each cluster node. Admins can also perform CPU control on Sun Cluster resource groups. Admins can assign maximum and minimum processors in a dedicated processor set for resource groups. By monitoring system resource usage, admins can identify resource bottlenecks and overload problems. All these can be achieved using Sun Cluster Manager once you have enabled telemetry. Admins can now view the performance of their resource groups from the graphs generated by Sun Cluster Manager for any period of time. You can also set up alarms for CPU usage levels of a resource group. You can read more about Service Level Management here.
With all these features, together with an enhanced response time and with new features being added, I think Sun Cluster Manager 3.2 is a useful tool to view and manage cluster objects. In fact, if you are just about getting started with Sun Cluster, you might want to check out the Sun Cluster Manager to familiarize yourself with cluster terminology and commands. You can also get a pictorial view of what your cluster setup consists of. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Try out the new Sun Cluster Manager 3.2 and let us know your feedback at scm-feedback-ext@sun.com . Suggestions and comments are welcome.
Bharathi Shekar Subramanian
Sun Cluster Engineering
Anyone knows a detailed tutorial about it?
Or a video tutorial?
Posted by youtube on May 10, 2008 at 07:05 PM PDT #