Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Service Execution
  •   Assign and Control Delivery Resources

Details

IBM® Tivoli® System Automation for Multiplatforms (SA) manages availability of business applications, running in single Linux® or AIX systems or clusters, according to customer-defined goals by:

• Fast detection of an outage
• Sophisticated knowledge about application components and their relationships
• Quick and consistent recovery of failed resources and whole applications either in place or on another system of a Linux cluster. This recovery can include activities such as shutting down the remainder of an application or even a whole failed system, moving a TCP/IP address or recovering data from log.

SA relieves operators from manual monitoring and can reduce down time of your critical business applications. SA maintains system availability in business context and reduces system outages.

SA manages business application availability by:

• Fast detection of outage through monitoring
• Sophisticated knowledge about application components and their relationships
• Quick and consistent recovery of failed resources and whole applications either in place or on another system in a AIX or Linux cluster

SA consists of 2 main components: The IBM Tivoli System Automation Manager (SAM) and t he Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology (RSCT) infrastructure. The IBM Tivoli System Automation Manager knows the cluster-wide status, locations, and the policy including groups and relationships. RSCT provides cluster-wide heart-beating, messaging, and resource management. The Resource Managers provide an abstract resource model including monitoring and start and stop methods.

These two components provide SA the capability to detect outages and perform complex corrective actions on Delivery Resources, hardware, and software. The use of SA Policy involves Resource information such as:

• start, stop, and monitor
• preferred systems
• groups of resources
• relationships

No programming is required to create this resource policy and new resources or systems can be added without re-writing scripts. SA reduces complexity of operations by focusing on the business level and not at the resource level. Creating the SA policy is a simple and straightforward process as this example shows.

1. Define a cluster consisting of n systems, in this case 2:
   mkrpdomain mycluster Sys1 Sys2
2. Use / define IT resources
   RSCT resource harvesting reduces setup time for FileSystems NetworkAdapters, ...
   Manual definition is required for Applications, IP addresses, ... with:
   mkrsrc IBM.Application Name=Res1 StartCommand=.. NodeNameList=..
3. Define automation policy
   Resource Groups mkrg Group
   Add members to group with:
   addrgmbr -s -g Group IBM.Application:"Name like 'Res%'"
   The % is a wildcard catching resources starting with Res
   Define any equivalencies for adapters with
   mkequiv..
   Relationships between resources are defined with
   mkrel -p DependsOn -S IBM.Application:Res1 -g IBM.Application: Res2
   Relationships are directed.

For More Information

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