SUMMARY: Veritas for HA - newbie questions

Hi Managers,

Thanks very much to the following for their collective wisdom:
Mark Bergman
AP
Joe Fletcher
Ed Kerekes
Hichael Morton
Yura Pismerov
Matthias Gocht
Alan Pae

For 1.	VxVM is NOT strictly necessary to use VCS, although it is said to
be easy enough to use.

For 2.	VxFS is also NOT necessary, with UFS having come along quite a
bit; it might suit certain requirements well enough. One reply was that a
VxFS filesystem would failover faster than a UFS one.

For 3.	Veritas Foundation Suite/HA consists of the 3 said items, but
having said that, whether that is the right item to get, would depend on
the necessity for VxVM and VxFS

For 4.	Not much comments about it, but some replies have mentioned not
using SANPoint in their clusters and not having any problems either.

There was mention of looking into Sun Cluster instead, and the
single-point-of-contact benefits as far as support was concerned. I will
definitely look into that possibility, if my storage is also Sun branded.

On the hardware front, T3 didn't score too badly, one reply mentioned the
limit of 2 LUNs per T3; which might limit it's usefulness in a SAN setup.
I have to pore through the T3 specs in detail to see if it has been
addressed, as I recall reading something about this limit as well on
the Sun website.

Other suggestions included sitting a pair of A1000s between the 2 servers
and mirroring it, the Sun StorEdge 3310, EMC Clariion FC and CX series of
storage, Storageworks MA8000.

One also mentioned saving costs on hardware raid by using VxVM. NetApp
filer with a gigabit ethernet pipe was also mentioned; although this being
used to hold mail boxes and mail spool - I tend to avoid NFS for this kind
of thing.

All in less than 24 hours too, my first reply came in within an hour.
Thanks to all!

Best Regards
Jeffrey


Original question follows:
===
Hi Managers,

I have been looking at the Veritas site trying to figure out how all the
Vx* stuff works together.

Basically I need to put together 2 Sun boxes + shared storage in an
active/passive setup for HA. Services to HA-ize are mail (Sendmail, imapd)
and apache, the storage will hold user mailboxes.

So far I've figured that I need Veritas Cluster Server, but from there
it's all question marks:

1.      Do I require VxVM? It seems that VCS needs to "import" disk
resources during the failover process, must the disk resources be managed
with VxVM?

2.      Do I require VxFS? I don't forsee much allocation/reallocation of
disk space, nor dynamic growing or shrinking of filesystems

3.      Is the Veritas Foundation Suite/HA the product I should get? I
assume it's comprised of VxVM, VxFS and VCS

4.      I've read mention of Veritas SANPoint, assuming I'm running an
active/passive cluster, ie. only one node writes to disk at any time; is
this still required?

The hardware I've identified so far is the V480; does anyone have
experiences on what storage to use? My current requirement is for not much
storage (50GB up to 500GB), but I would like this storage to be
"pluggable" into a SAN infrastructure later; will the T3 be a good
candidate for this?

Would be most grateful for any advise and answers, I will summarise.
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