Configuring the shared disks

A WebSphere® MQ queue manager in an HA cluster requires data files and log files to be in common named remote file systems on a shared disk.

To configure the shared disks, complete the following steps:

  1. Decide the names of the mount points for the queue manager's file systems. For example, /MQHA/qmgrname/data for the queue manager's data files and /MQHA/qmgrname/log for its log files.
  2. Create a volume group (or disk group) to contain the queue manager's data and log files. This volume group is managed by the high availability (HA) cluster in the same resource group as the queue manager.
  3. Create the file systems for the queue manager's data and log files in the volume group.
  4. For each node in turn, create the mount points for the file systems and make sure that the file systems can be mounted. The mqm user must own the mount points.
Figure 1 shows a possible layout for a queue manager in an HA cluster. The queue manager's data and log directories are both on the shared disk which is mounted at /MQHA/QM1. This disk is switched between the nodes of the HA cluster when failover occurs so that the data is available wherever the queue manager is restarted. The mqs.ini file has a stanza for the QM1 queue manager. The Log stanza in the qm.ini file has a value for LogPath.
Figure 1. Shared named data and log directories
In this example, the data and log directories are children of a named share (MQHA/QM1 in the picture). The /MQHA/QM1 share is mounted as a shared file system.