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| tessmonsta |
 Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:25 am Post subject: Virtualization and HA |
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Apprentice
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 29
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Is there any way to gain some kind of HA/warm backup ability for WebSphere MQ using VMWare Server? Currently we have only one machine used for inbound MQ communication and it's not HA.
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| Michael Dag |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:30 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 13 Jun 2002
Posts: 2607
Location: The Netherlands (Amsterdam)
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VMWare Server in itself does not provide MQ HA,
for Windows OS look at MSCS Cluster and see if that supports clustering of VM Ware machines rather then real machines.
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Michael
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| tessmonsta |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:33 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 29
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| Michael Dag wrote: |
VMWare Server in itself does not provide MQ HA,
for Windows OS look at MSCS Cluster and see if that supports clustering of VM Ware machines rather then real machines. |
Not HA in the literal sense, but some sort of failover ability. We can accept an outage of 30 minutes in necessary.
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| jefflowrey |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:36 am Post subject: |
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Grand Poobah
Joined: 16 Oct 2002
Posts: 19981
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It depends on what you need to recover.
In general, for any kind of real failover, you need a real HA implementation.
If you need to recover messages sitting on queues, you need a real HA implementation.
Otherwise, you can do things with VM snapshots, maybe.
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| tessmonsta |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:41 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 29
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| jefflowrey wrote: |
It depends on what you need to recover.
In general, for any kind of real failover, you need a real HA implementation.
If you need to recover messages sitting on queues, you need a real HA implementation.
Otherwise, you can do things with VM snapshots, maybe. |
That's what we're thinking. The first queue manager is in the network DMZ and routes messages to the broker queue manager behind the firewall. If an outage occurs, we'll restart the image or move it to a different box. We'd lose messages, but that's acceptable for the few months we need it.
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| jefflowrey |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:54 am Post subject: |
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Grand Poobah
Joined: 16 Oct 2002
Posts: 19981
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The only thing to be careful of is the image getting corrupted.
I mean, if the VM machine crashes, the image that backs it up may not be useable. So, snapshots, I guess.
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| tessmonsta |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:57 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
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| jefflowrey wrote: |
The only thing to be careful of is the image getting corrupted.
I mean, if the VM machine crashes, the image that backs it up may not be useable. So, snapshots, I guess. |
That was another thing I thought we could do. Maintain weekly snapshots of the image. We can also set up a capture of queue manager definitions.
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| tessmonsta |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 8:28 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 29
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Here's another question: Can these images be run in parallel with some sort of load balancer like f5?
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| jefflowrey |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 8:44 am Post subject: |
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Grand Poobah
Joined: 16 Oct 2002
Posts: 19981
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You don't want two queue managers with the same name on the same MQ network.
You can't use an NLB for MQ server connections, only MQ client connections.
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| billybong |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 8:49 am Post subject: |
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Disciple
Joined: 22 Jul 2005
Posts: 150
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
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You could just store your runtime data on a shared external disk, i.e. SAN.
Then you have two separated vmware images, where only one is running at any time.
If the image goes down, start your backup and mount the external filesystem on the same drive as you installed MQ runtime on earlier. Start the queue manager manually.
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| tessmonsta |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 8:52 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
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| jefflowrey wrote: |
You don't want two queue managers with the same name on the same MQ network.
You can't use an NLB for MQ server connections, only MQ client connections. |
You're right, now that I think about it that wouldn't work at all.
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| tessmonsta |
| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 8:57 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
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| billybong wrote: |
You could just store your runtime data on a shared external disk, i.e. SAN.
Then you have two separated vmware images, where only one is running at any time.
If the image goes down, start your backup and mount the external filesystem on the same drive as you installed MQ runtime on earlier. Start the queue manager manually. |
I don't think they have or want a SAN for their present system (that or I don't understand how SAN works). Could I mount /var/mqm on a network drive, and share the file system between the two images? Like you said, only one would be up at time.
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| billybong |
| Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:40 am Post subject: |
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Disciple
Joined: 22 Jul 2005
Posts: 150
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
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That would work, yes.
Or I guess you could use links to another FS that is a network drive if you'd rather like to.
You have to have some manual or scripted control over when the qmgrs should start though, so that you dont start them when the disk is not available.
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