Migrating a queue manager in a high-availability configuration

High-availability configurations of queue managers can increase the availability of IBM® MQ applications. If a queue manager, or server fails, it is restarted automatically on another server. You can arrange for IBM MQ MQI client applications to automatically reconnect to the queue manager. Server applications can be configured to start when the queue manager starts.

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[UNIX, Linux, Windows, IBM i]For IBM MQ for Multiplatforms, high-availability configurations can be implemented by using a high-availability cluster solution or by using multi-instance queue managers. Red Hat Cluster Suite or Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) are examples of high-availability cluster solutions.

[Linux]For Linux® platforms, you can implement high availability by using replicated data queue managers (RDQMs). For migrating RDQMs, see Migrating replicated data queue managers.

[z/OS]For IBM MQ for z/OS® there are several alternative techniques to increase queue manager availability; see Availability on z/OS. Migration considerations on z/OS depend on the availability techniques that are employed, and are not described in this topic. The term high-availability configuration refers only to queue managers in configurations on platforms other than z/OS.

[MQ Appliance]Another solution is to configure a high availability group on a pair of IBM MQ Appliances. See the Appliance documentation for details of migrating HA queue managers.

The overall principles involved in queue manager migration in a high availability configuration based on multi-instance queue managers or on a high-availability cluster are the same. In either case, the principles are as follows:

  1. You must not restart a queue manager at a lower command level than the one it was previously running.
  2. You cannot upgrade the code if an active queue manager is running.
  3. You cannot back up an active queue manager.