About planning to configure I/O fencing


About planning to configure I/O fencing
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After you configure SFCFSHA with the installer, you must configure I/O fencing in the cluster for data integrity. Application clusters on release version 6.1 (HTTPS-based communication) only support CP servers on release version 6.1 and later.

You can configure 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 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. Symantec recommends the use of single CP server-based fencing only in test environments.

If you have installed Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability in a virtual environment that is not SCSI-3 PR compliant, you can configure non-SCSI-3 server-based fencing.

See Figure: Workflow to configure non-SCSI-3 server-based I/O fencing.

Figure: Workflow to configure I/O fencing illustrates a high-level flowchart to configure I/O fencing for the Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability cluster.

Figure: Workflow to configure I/O fencing

Figure: Workflow to configure non-SCSI-3 server-based I/O fencing illustrates a high-level flowchart to configure non-SCSI-3 server-based I/O fencing for the Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability cluster in virtual environments that do not support SCSI-3 PR.

Figure: Workflow to configure non-SCSI-3 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 installsfcfsha	See Setting up disk-based I/O fencing using installsfcfsha. See Setting up server-based I/O fencing using installsfcfsha. See Setting up non-SCSI-3 server-based I/O fencing in virtual environments using installsfcfsha.
Using the web-based installer	See Configuring Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability for data integrity 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 non-SCSI-3 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-SCSI-3 fencing in virtual environments manually.

You can also migrate from one I/O fencing configuration to another.

See the Symantec Storage foundation High Availability Administrator's Guide for more details.