Resource Groups

Considerations for Resource Group Naming Standards at Mt Xia

These Resource Group Naming standards are:

• consistent and repeatable procedures
• compatible with standalone, high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, and virtualized environments
• used with storage allocation procedures to identify volume groups
• used with storage allocation procedures to identify logical volumes
• used with storage allocation procedures to identify log logical volumes
• used with storage allocation procedures to identify directory mount points
• used with high availability procedures to coordinate fail-over resources
• used with high availability procedures to eliminate resource conflicts
• used with disaster recovery procedures to coordinate fail-over resources
• used with disaster recovery procedures to eliminate resource conflicts
• used with VIO servers to identify virtualized storage assignments
• used with DNS records to identify user and application host name aliases
• used by users and applications as host name aliases to access business functions
• used as EWU user names for business function or application administrator login
• used with workload manager (WLM) to segment process classes into enterprise wide unique groups
• used with partition load manager (PLM) to allocate resources to system groups

The focus of this document will be to describe a Resource Group (RG) naming standard that will help the system administrator organize and manage a variety of resources across the AIX environment, enterprise wide.

The naming standard described here is based on an entity called the “Resource Group” (RG), which may be familiar to the reader if they use the IBM clustering software HACMP. However the term “Resource Group” is used here in a much larger sense than used in HACMP. The HACMP definition of a resource group is a named set of resources consisting of host names, volume groups, logical volumes, file systems, application servers, and other items that are used to support a program or application. In the business continuity methodology defined by this series of document, the resource group concept is extended to include all resources supporting a business function on any system, regardless of whether the system is running HACMP or not. This definition of a resource group provides the ability to containerize business functions so they may be portable across multiple systems, between data centers, or between organizations.

Table 1: Resource Group Naming Standard

Application Code	Environment Identifier	Function Identifier	Company Code	Sequence Identifier
3 characters Alpha-Numeric Lower Case	1 character Alphabetic Lower case	1 character Alphabetic Lower Case	2 characters Alphabetic Lower case	1 character Numeric
Represents the application supported by this resource group.	Represents the business environment.	Represents the business function.	Represents the customer supported by this resource group.	Represents the sequence number of this resource group to distinguish between multiple instances of resource groups of the same type.
Examples: ora = Oracle db2 = DB2 tib = Tibco web = Websphere apa = Apache pag = Paging Space	Examples: p = Production g = Pre-production a = Acceptance t = Test d = Development	Examples: d = Database a = Application u = Utility m = Management	Examples: mx = Mt Xia ib = IBM hp = HP ci = Cisco	Examples: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

Table 1 illustrates the structure for a resource group naming standard. This structure identifies a resource group name that is 8 characters in length. The reason for the limited number of characters in the resource group name is because this name will be used as the basis of numerous entities in the AIX environment, such as VTD names, volume group names, logical volume names, file system directory mount points, host name aliases, and others. Each of these entities will begin with the resource group name and additional characters will be added to produce an enterprise wide unique identifier. Some of the naming standards for these other AIX entities extend the length of the name to 14 characters, so to avoid creating a name for these other entities that is too long, the resource group name is limited to 8 characters. Some example resource group names using the values shown in Table 1 are illustrated in Table 2.

Table 2: Example Resource Group Names

Application Code	Environment Identifier	Function Identifier	Company Code	Sequence Identifier	Example Resource Group Name
ora	p	d	mx	0	orapdmx0
ora	p	d	mx	1	orapdmx1
db2	a	d	ib	0	db2adib0
tib	t	a	hp	8	tibtahp8
web	d	a	ib	4	webdaib4
apa	a	a	ci	3	apaaaci3
pag	p	u	mx	0	pagpumx0

Defining the RG name on the VIO servers requires planning of the client LPAR before it is created or provisioned by the VIO servers. This planning includes identification of the application volume groups on the client LPAR and quantity of storage space to be allocated to each volume group. The volume group name is another entity that will be based on the resource group name. Since a resource group can contain multiple volume groups, each volume group will have a sequence number to distinguish it as an enterprise wide unique value. A volume group naming standard will be provided in a separate document, but for the purpose of this document and defining the RG name, the volume group name will consist of the resource group name, followed by a 2 digit sequence number, followed by the literal characters “vg”. So before the client LPAR is created and before any storage space is allocated, the client LPAR volume group names must be defined.

The policies, guidelines, standards, and procedures set forth in this document for your consideration are as follows:

Policies: Those tasks that must be implemented

• One or more resource groups will be defined for each business function provisioned.
• Each Resource Group Name will be an enterprise wide unique identifier.
• Client LPAR volume groups will be planned and storage requirements will be determined before an LPAR is created.

Guidelines: Those tasks that should be implemented

Standards: Technical specifications derived from the policies and guidelines

• This document defines a resource group naming standard.

Procedures: Step-by-step implementation instructions of the standards