Ensuring maximum service-level availability and data protection is paramount to enterprise IT infrastructure. Automated failure detection and recovery prevents downtime, and reduces the financial and operational impact of outages to the business. Highly available infrastructure is a key requirement for IT decision makers.
The PlateSpin Orchestrate Server is a critical component of your enterprise infrastructure. It continuously monitors and manages physical servers and virtual machines (VMs), and provides high availability for virtual machines by automatically restarting them on alternate physical servers if the server they are running on becomes unavailable because of a planned or unplanned outage. Therefore, the Orchestrate Server itself must be highly available.
In PlateSpin Orchestrate, high availability services are provided by a specialized set of applications that run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES 10). Heartbeat 2 is high availability clustering software that provides multinode failover and service-level health monitoring for Linux-based services. Heartbeat 2 monitors both physical servers and the services running on them, and automatically restarts services if they fail.
This guide describes how to configure PlateSpin Orchestrate in a Heartbeat 2 cluster and how to provide both service-level restart for the Orchestrate Server and failover among the physical servers of a Linux cluster to ensure that PlateSpin Orchestrate remains available and responsive to the infrastructure that it manages.
This section includes the following information: