About planning to configure I/O fencing
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About planning to configure I/O fencing

After you configure VCS with the installer, you must configure I/O fencing in the cluster for data integrity.

You can configure either disk-based I/O fencing or server-based I/O fencing. If your enterprise setup has multiple clusters that use VCS for clustering, Symantec recommends you to configure server-based I/O fencing.

The coordination points in server-based fencing can include only CP servers or a mix of CP servers and coordinator disks. Symantec also supports server-based fencing with a a single coordination point which is a single highly available CP server that is hosted on an SFHA cluster.

Warning:

For server-based fencing configurations that use a single coordination point (CP server), the coordination point becomes a single point of failure. In such configurations, the arbitration facility is not available during a failover of the CP server in the SFHA cluster. So, if a network partition occurs on any application cluster during the CP server failover, the application cluster is brought down.

If you have installed VCS in a virtual environment that is not SCSI-3 PR compliant, you can configure non-SCSI3 server-based fencing.

See Figure: Workflow to configure non-SCSI3 server-based I/O fencing.

Figure: Workflow to configure I/O fencing illustrates a high-level flowchart to configure I/O fencing for the VCS cluster.

Figure: Workflow to configure I/O fencing

Workflow to configure I/O fencing

Figure: Workflow to configure non-SCSI3 server-based I/O fencing illustrates a high-level flowchart to configure non-SCSI3 server-based I/O fencing for the VCS cluster in virtual environments that do not support SCSI-3 PR.

Figure: Workflow to configure non-SCSI3 server-based I/O fencing

Workflow to configure non-SCSI3 server-based I/O fencing

After you perform the preparatory tasks, you can use any of the following methods to configure I/O fencing:

Using the installvcs program

See Setting up disk-based I/O fencing using installvcs program.

See Setting up server-based I/O fencing using installvcs program.

See Setting up non-SCSI3 server-based I/O fencing using installvcs program.

Using the Web-based installer

Note:

The Web-based installer supports only the disk-based fencing configuration.

See Configuring VCS using the Web-based installer.

Using response files

See Response file variables to configure disk-based I/O fencing.

See Response file variables to configure server-based I/O fencing.

See Response file variables to configure server-based I/O fencing.

See Configuring I/O fencing using response files.

Manually editing configuration files

See Setting up disk-based I/O fencing manually.

See Setting up server-based I/O fencing manually.

See Setting up non-SCSI3 fencing in virtual environments manually.
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