Planning CSM as your systems management application

When you use Cluster-Ready Hardware Server (CRHS) with Cluster Systems Management (CSM), the CSM Management Server (CSM/MS) is typically the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server for the service virtual local area network (VLAN). If the cluster VLAN is a public site network or a local site network, then it is possible that another server might be set up as the DHCP server.

The configuration settings planned in this topic can be recorded in the Cluster Systems Management planning work sheet.

You must set up the CSM/MS to be a stand-alone server. If you use one of the compute servers or I/O servers in the cluster for CSM, the CSM operation might degrade performance for user applications and complicate the installation process with respect to server setup and discovery on the service VLAN.

You must also set up CSM event management to be used in a cluster. To do this action, you need to plan for the following items:

The type of syslogd command that you are going to use. At the least, you need to understand the default syslogd command that comes with the operating system on which CSM is run.
Whether you want to use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as the protocol for transferring syslog entries from the fabric management server to the CSM/MS. You must use UDP if the CSM/MS is using the syslog command. If the CSM/MS has the syslog-ng logging application installed, you can use TCP for better reliability. The switches only use UDP.
If the syslog-ng application is used on the CSM/MS, a source reference (SRC) line controls the IP addresses and ports over which the syslog-ng application accepts logs. The default setup is address 0.0.0.0, which means all addresses. For added security, you might want to plan to have an SRC definition for each switch IP address and each fabric management server IP address rather than opening all IP addresses on the service VLAN. For information about the format of the SRC line, see Setting up remote logging.

Running the remote command from the CSM/MS to the fabric management servers is advantageous when you have more than one Fabric Management Server in a cluster. To start the remote command to the fabric management servers, you need to research how to exchange Secure Shell (SSH) keys between the fabric management server and the CSM/MS. This is standard, open SSH protocol setup as done in either the AIX® operating system or the Linux® operating system.

If you do not require a CSM Management Server, you might need a server to act as a Network Installation Manager (NIM) server for diagnostics. This is the case for servers that do not have removable media (CD or DVD) capabilities, such as the 9118-575.

If you have servers with no removable media capabilities that are running Linux logical partitions, you might need to have a server act as a distribution server.

If you require both a NIM server and a distribution server, and you choose the same server for both, a reboot is needed to change between the services. If the NIM server is used only for stand-alone diagnostics, it might be acceptable to use the same server. However, by using the same server for both a NIM server and distribution server might prolong a service call if use of the NIM server is required. For example, the server that might normally act as a distribution server could have a second boot image to the server as the NIM server. If NIM server services are required for stand-alone diagnostics during a service call, the distribution server must be rebooted to the NIM image before diagnostics can be performed.