PowerHA SystemMirror Smart Assist development concepts

Smart Assist is a tool to help end users configure PowerHA® SystemMirror® to make an instance of an application (such as a DB2® or Oracle instance, or a WebSphere® component) highly available.

Each Smart Assist manages the collection of PowerHA SystemMirror components needed to support a particular application. The user sees the collection of PowerHA SystemMirror components as a single entity, and in PowerHA SystemMirror that entity is represented by an application name. Smart Assists support adding, modifying and removing individual applications. When configuring PowerHA SystemMirror for new applications, the Smart Assist will ask the end user for the minimum amount of information necessary and then auto-detect the file systems, volume groups, service IP labels and other application resources used by the selected application instance. The Smart Assist then configures one or more PowerHA SystemMirror resource groups, application controllers and application monitors as needed to make the application highly available. This saves the end user steps in the configuration process and also helps ensure the proper configuration of the base application instance within PowerHA SystemMirror.

Smart Assists can be comprised of multiple components; each component supports a particular aspect of the target application. As an example, the Oracle Smart Assist has three components - one for supporting Oracle RDBMS, a second for supporting Oracle Application Server CFC, and a third for supporting Oracle Application Server AFC. Each of these components can have different Smart Assist properties, as well as different user interfaces within SMIT.

Smart Assists also integrate with cluster verification. Smart Assists can use the custom PowerHA SystemMirror verification methods to perform cluster verification. In the event a user modifies either the target application configuration, or the PowerHA SystemMirror configuration, custom verification routines will ensure the application will continue to function.