Agents are multi-threaded processes that provide the logic to manage resources. VCS has one agent per resource type. The agent monitors all resources of that type; for example, a single IP agent manages all IP resources.

When the agent starts, it obtains the necessary configuration information from the VCS engine. It then periodically monitors the resources, and updates the VCS engine with the resource status. The agents that support Intelligent Monitoring Framework (IMF) also monitors the resources asynchronously. These agents register with the IMF notification module for resource state change notifications. Enabling IMF for process-based and mount-based agents can give you significant performance benefits in terms of system resource utilization and also aid faster failover of applications.

See About resource monitoring.

The action to bring a resource online or take it offline differs significantly for each resource type. For example, when you bring a disk group online, it requires importing the disk group. But, when you bring a database online, it requires that you start the database manager process and issue the appropriate startup commands.

VCS monitors resources when they are online and offline to ensure that they are not started on systems where they are not supposed to run. For this reason, VCS starts the agent for any resource that is configured to run on a system when the cluster is started. If no resources of a particular type are configured, the agent is not started. For example, if no Oracle resources exist in your configuration, the Oracle agent is not started on the system.

Certain agents can identify when an application has been intentionally shut down outside of VCS control. For agents that support this functionality, if an administrator intentionally shuts down an application outside of VCS control, VCS does not treat it as a fault. VCS sets the service group state as offline or partial, which depends on the state of other resources in the service group.

This feature allows administrators to stop applications that do not cause a failover. The feature is available for V51 agents. Agent versions are independent of VCS versions. For example, VCS 6.0 can run V40, V50, V51, and V52 agents for backward compatibility.