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 Novell® ZENworks® Orchestrator 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 should the server they are running on become unavailable (either due to planned or unplanned outage). Therefore, the Orchestrator Server itself must be highly available.
In ZENworks Orchestrator, High Availability (HA) services are provided by a specialized set of applications that run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES10). Heartbeat2 is HA clustering software that provides multi-node failover and service-level health monitoring for Linux-based services. Heartbeat monitors both physical servers and the services running on them, and automatically restarts services if they fail.
This guide describes how to configure ZENworks Orchestrator in a Heartbeat2 cluster and how to provide both service-level restart for the Orchestrator server and failover between the physical servers of a Linux cluster to ensure that ZENworks Orchestrator remains available and responsive to the infrastructure that it manages.
This section includes the following information: