Framework and Data Services for Sun Cluster 3.2

As you know by now, the company (Azimuth Labs) I work for is a partner of Sun Microsystems. We carried out Professional Services on behalf of Sun.

Yesterday, I went to perform a Sun Cluster 3.2 Data Service for SAP on Solaris 10 for one of the national healthcare group in Singapore.

It was supposed to be a breeze job for me. However, when I arrived, I realized the EIS was not performed. I spent a couple of minutes to explain to the anxious customer who insisted that the SAP had to be clustered by end of the day.


To get Sun Cluster to be fully functional, 2 tasks are involved:

• Installation of Sun Cluster Framework (Cluster binary install; Volume Manager install & configuration)
• Configuration of Sun Cluster Data Service

Here's the difference between Framework and Data Services for any Sun Cluster implementation:

• EIS ("Enterprise Installation Service") is a comprehensive installation service that comes packaged with your Solaris OS, Sun Cluster and Volume Manager (Solaris or Veritas) purchase.
• Data Service is a configuration service that comes packaged with your specific Cluster Agent purchase. (in this case, customer bought Oracle HA agent, SAP agent, NFS agent, and Generic Data Service agent for her SAP systems)

Now, the next thing to understand is:

• EIS is carried out by the SS (System Service) team from Sun and is time-consuming
• Data Service is carried out by the PS (Professional Service) team from Sun - this is where I play my part

As such, we went to the extend to activate the SS team from Sun to perform the EIS for Sun Cluster framework installation. It took many hours before I could continue with my Data Service implementation.