Thumbs up to ServiceGuard Manager

Being a CLI kind of guy I've never been really attracted to ServiceGuard Manager, especially the first web-based versions. However, since it started having a map view again , I find myself increasingly proposing it to support personnel who find it more intuitive than using the CLI. Training time is decreased at least three fold by using SG Manager.

Today, I decided to try to build a small package from scratch using the GUI instead of making the config files manually and was delighted by its ease of use. I won't publish too much screenshots as those I took contain confidential data and it would take me a while to obfuscate them. But here are two teasers:



The general look is polished, and very intuitive. The interface is responsive. Online help is readily available, with a question mark icon and sometimes with pop-on bubbles. This makes creating packages an easy task which is done in minutes without needing to go through the ServiceGuard manual.

Behind the scenes, SG Manager takes care of migrating the configuration files on all nodes itself. You don't need to copy them manually. Furthermore, they're very easy to read. Here is an example of a config file generated by SG Manager:

#  module name and version
operation_sequence          $SGCONF/scripts/sg/package_ip.sh
operation_sequence          $SGCONF/scripts/sg/service.sh
package_description         Quorum Server
module_name                 sg/basic
module_version              1
module_name                 sg/package_ip
module_version              1
module_name                 sg/priority
module_version              1
module_name                 sg/monitor_subnet
module_version              1
module_name                 sg/failover
module_version              1
module_name                 sg/service
module_version              1
package_type                FAILOVER
NODE_NAME                   mtlrelux00
NODE_NAME                   mtlprdux00
auto_run                    yes
node_fail_fast_enabled      no
run_script_timeout          no_timeout
halt_script_timeout         no_timeout
successor_halt_timeout      no_timeout
script_log_file             $SGRUN/log/$SG_PACKAGE.log
log_level                   0
PRIORITY                    NO_PRIORITY

failover_policy             CONFIGURED_NODE
failback_policy             MANUAL

# Package monitored subnets...
monitored_subnet 1.2.3.0
local_lan_failover_allowed  yes

# Package subnets and relocatable IP addresses ...
ip_subnet 1.2.3.0
ip_address 1.2.3.10

# Package services...
service_name                            qs
service_cmd                             /usr/lbin/qs >>/var/adm/qs/qs.log 2>&1
service_restart                         3
service_fail_fast_enabled               no
service_halt_timeout                    0

Instead of a sea of comments, there are only a few well-placed onces, which make re-editing and fine-tuning configuration files an easy task.

Nice piece of work! I think I've been converted to ServiceGuard Manager.

O.