Mt Xia: Technical Consulting Group

Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery / High Availability
Data Center Automation / Audit Response / Audit Compliance

Additional documents of interest

  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 1 - Users and Groups
    This article was published in the April 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses system administration needs and requirements oriented around users and groups. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters, such as user names, group names, UID and GID numbers.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 2 - Machine and Host Names
    This article was published in the May 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses naming structures for machines, systems, adapters, and aliases. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 3 - Volume Names
    This article was published in the December 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses naming structures for volume groups, logical volumes, log logical volumes, directory mount points, etc. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 4 - MQ Series, Startup/Shutdown Scripts, Error Processing
    This article was published in the April 2006 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses how to implement AIX in an environment dedicated to business continuity. The topic of this article is the assignment of MQ Series queue names and aliases, resource group startup and shutdown script names (Application startup/shutdown script names), error logging, and error notification.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 5 - Miscellaneous topics
    This article was published in the August 2006 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses how to implement AIX in an environment dedicated to business continuity. A variety of topics is discussed in this article including automated documentation generation and management.
  • Automated Microcode Management System
    One of the most difficult administration tasks in an AIX environment is attempting to keep the firmware and microcode up-to-date. Mt Xia has devised an automated method of gathering the Microcode information, determining which microcode needs to be updated, generating reports, and uploading the required microcode updates to each individual system.
  • Calculating the size of a Virtual Processor
    This document describes the algorithms used to calculate the size of a virtual processor when using shared processors in an LPAR. The IBM documentation describes how to calculate CPU utilization, NOT how to size for configuration, this document clarifies this process. A description of the HMC input fields for the processor tab is included.
  • Basics of Partition Load Manager Setup
    This presentation was provided by Ron Barker from IBM regarding the PLM Basic setup.
  • ppt
  • pdf
  • Hostname Standards

    In order to achieve maximum flexibility during normal operations, maintenance, disaster recovery, and business continuity efforts, it is important to provide a naming standard for business functions that can be translated easily into hostnames and/or aliases. The purpose of using hostnames instead of IP addresses is that they are easier to remember and use. Hostnames are not necessary, but usually desirable.

    Normal user access to an application or business function will always be through an alias. Normal users should never access a system using a hostname. The reason is for portability and availability. It is easy to redirect an alias to any host, it is significantly more difficult to change hostnames. By having the users access required services through aliases rather than hostnames, the users can be redirected quickly to available services in the event of a failure.


    Hostnames

    In Mt Xia's environment, a hostname refers to an IP address, the IP address is associated with one or more network adapters. It is important to recognize that an IP address is not necessarily tied to a network adapter, but may float across adapters and machines. The same is true with the hostnames. A hostname should be viewed as being independent from any machine or data center. The hostname shall be an enterprise wide unique value in order to eliminate conflicts during manual, automated, or disaster recovery failovers.

    The hostname shall consist of exactly 10 characters with the following structure:

    LocationCode + OS Type + Environment + ApplicationCode + SequenceID
       3 char    + 1 char  +    1 char   +      3 char     +   2 char   =  10 char
    

    The detailed information for each component of the resource group name is described below:

    HostName
    Component
    Number of
    Characters
    Values
    Location Code 3
    dal = Dallas Data Center
    bos = Boston Data Center
    
    OS Type 1
    a = AIX
    s = Sun
    
    Environment 1
    a = acceptance
    a = pre-production
    d = test/development
    p = production
    t = test
    x = disaster recovery
    x = pre-production
    
    Application Code 3
    atl = Atlas
    ega = EGATE
    nim = NIM
    ora = Oracle
    tps = Maximo
    vio = Virtual I/O
    
    Sequence ID 2
    0-9,A-Z,a-z
    


    Examples of Hostnames (HN):

  • dalapega01
    EGATE Production database on AIX at Dallas Data Center, first instance
  • dalapega01
    EGATE Production database on AIX at Dallas Data Center, second instance
  • bosapnim01
    Production Network Information Manager on AIX at Boston Data Center, first instance
  • dalapnim01
    Production Network Information Manager on AIX at Dallas Data Center, first instance
  • bosapvio01
    Production Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Boston Data Center, first instance
  • bosapvio02
    Production Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Boston Data Center, second instance
  • bosapvio03
    Production Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Boston Data Center, third instance
  • bosapvio04
    Production Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Boston Data Center, fourth instance
  • dalaavio01
    Acceptance Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Dallas Data Center, first instance
  • dalaavio02
    Acceptance Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Dallas Data Center, second instance
  • dalaavio03
    Acceptance Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Dallas Data Center, third instance
  • dalaavio04
    Acceptance Virtual I/O Server on AIX at Dallas Data Center, fourth instance

  • Aliases

    The rules for defining alias names are significantly less rigid than for hostnames. The alias can be any name as long as it is unique within the domain. This allows the application to be accessed though a name that makes logical sense to the user. For example, the production EGATE Application Server at the Dallas Data Center may have a hostname of "bosapega03", however the alias may be "bosegate". The use of aliases preserves the structure needed for hostnames and the ease of use desired by users.

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