This is divided into four parts description of installation process of TIBCO domain on Windows 2008 R2 Failover Cluster. The aim of this is to get running on two hosts fault-tolerant TIBCO domain which contain two TIBCO EMS servers. Each TIBCO EMS server is running as cluster application and use cluster disk for data store. This solution helps to get fault-tolerant TIBCO EMS design and there is no need to have shared volumes, which is expensive solution and not available on the Windows platform yet (CSV is recently appeared exclusion made for Hyper-V). The final configuration shown in the TIBCO Administrator screenshot on the right, where is S-TST01-TIB01 is the first node and S-TST02-TIB01 is the second node. TIBCO Administrator is running on each node as master/secondary pair. Test application is running on the same hosts as fault-tolerant group in active/standby mode. But the most interesting part of domain is TST00-TIB01 – cluster service which acting as virtual host where both EMS servers live in TIBCO domain. I will explain from the beginning.
First of all I’m going to prepare two nodes cluster. Base software is MS Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition. Here are two disk connected to both cluster nodes. In my case storage system connected to servers via iSCSI interface. Two volumes were prepared: one small 5G will be act as cluster quorum disk, second large 50G will be used for clustered application data store. Both are raw volumes at this time.
I’m going to put both volumes online and initialize it. If you will do it like me, do it only on one node! After this step I can create NTFS file system on quorum disk. Start “New Simple Volume Wizard”, let it to use whole disk, assign drive letter, I prefer “Q” for quorum, then perform a quick format with default settings.
I suppose that both my nodes are ready for failover cluster. But the best practice to check it before. So, I will start cluster validation process. Here a lot of steps for testing cluster core resources availability such as network and storages. During testing, access to shared volumes will be checked from both nodes. After completion of testing, validation report will be generated. In my case warning message was received as my network adapter has no redundancy: between my servers only one network path and it will be a single point of failure. In production cluster it is better to avoid things like this, I will correct this before going to production.
As all other things were good, I’m ready to create failover cluster. I just start “Create Cluster Wizard” and add the names of all the servers that I want to have in the cluster. Then type the cluster name. After confirmation, cluster creation and configuration process will be running. When cluster will be formed, summary message and final report will be generated. Everything looks very good in my case, so I’m ready to prepare storage for cluster data disk. In future, it will be used as storage for TIBCO EMS and TIBCO Hawk. The steps are the same as for quorum disk: “New Simple Volume Wizard”, drive letter assign, let it be “T” for TIBCO, NTFS quick format.
After that my storage is available as cluster resource and I’m prepared to create cluster resources that will be used for TIBCO services. I will start with “Create Empty Service or Application” action, then rename this new service to TST00-TIB01 and add client access point with the same name: TST00-TIB01. IP address will be assigned automatically by DHCP. Then it’s time to add storage to this service. I will select my available Cluster Disk 1.
Last step is bring this service group online. At this point of time both nodes are ready for TIBCO software installation. I will continue from this point in the part 2.
1. Comment by Chris Jimenez
5/Jun/2010 at 1:24 am
I assume this process should also work on a Windows 2003 cluster?
2. Comment by Serge
7/Jun/2010 at 9:21 pm
Sure, on w2k3 installation steps are the same.
3. Comment by tib_user
17/Jul/2010 at 11:38 am
am setting up the fault tolerance between two Business Works engine which are deployed at two separate machines. It is worth noting that while setting up the primary server for the domain using domain utility, i selected TIBCO EMS as domain protocol. Also my both primary (BW Engine 2) and secondary servers (BW Engine 2) has both “Database Information Stored in Database” and “local application data” option configured.
Now i created a simple EAR file which only carries one process starter process. During the time of deployment, i selected Secondary Server as additional machine. I then selected FT Weight (300 for BWEngine 1 and 150 for BW Engine2), Enable Fault tolerance, heartbeat interval, Activation and preparation interval. I then deployed it on both BW Engine.
As a reult of deployment, i was expecting my service to be shown as running on BW Engine 1 and Standby in BW Enngine 2 but both the services are having their status as running.
I was expecting one of them to go in Running state and the other on Standby mode. I couldn’t bring them running in fault tolerance mode.
May i know what step i have missed in setting up in FT between two BW Engines?
4. Comment by Serge
18/Jul/2010 at 10:28 pm
How did you run it? Did you mark both instances and then press start? They both should be “Staring Up”, then both “Standing by”, then one of them changes state to “Running”. I will send to you some of my screenshots.