Overview of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) Configuration Files

In a previous article, Introduction to Veritas Cluster Server, I gave a general overview of the VCS product and how it's put together and what you can do with it.  In this article I'll give a general overview of how you go about configuring it.

Before writing this, I have had no dealings with with product before, so hopefully what I cover here will help some lazy folk out there to quickly get an idea of what configuring this product is about.  I'm going to be looking at it from a Solaris perspective, since I believe most of the deployments of this product out in the field is on Solaris, and it's what I may have to support and perhaps you too.  I think it's very similar to the way it's done on Red Hat, so don't fear.

Files

The configuration files are normally in: /etc/VRTSvcs/conf/config

There are two main configuration files:

1. main.cf that defines the entire cluster.
2. types.cf that defines the resource types. 

There are more like the above, if more agents are used.  For example Oracletypes.cf.

These configuration files are loaded an maintained in a specific way.  The first node to start up in the cluster reads the configuration file from disk and keeps it in-memory and when other systems come online they have this configuration synchronized to them.  They write these files back to disk, and also updates to it gets written back to disk this way.  The only time you can really edit these from the command line is when the cluster is stopped.  Then you edit it on one server, start that server up and the others after it.

The language of the configuration file would look familiar to most system administrators.  You use curly braces around most things, and there are include clauses to import configuration from other files.