Support for the IBM MQ Advanced container images

From IBM® MQ Advanced version 9.4.1 onwards, you can use the prebuilt IBM MQ Advanced container image without the IBM MQ Operator

The prebuilt IBM MQ Advanced container image is made up of several logical layers:

IBM MQ container enablement code (runmqserver, chkmqhealthy, chkmqready and chkmqstarted)
IBM MQ Advanced itself
Red Hat® packages from the Red Hat Universal Base Image

Supported platforms

The prebuilt IBM MQ Advanced image can be deployed into container runtime environments provided by containerd, cri-o, Podman or Docker. For more details, see System Requirements for IBM MQ. IBM provides defect and usage support for the IBM-supplied MQ container enablement code and IBM MQ Advanced itself, but does not help users configure and debug problems with their container environment or deployment pipeline.

Important: Red Hat provides support for the Red Hat packages only for containers running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® or Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS hosts. See Red Hat Container Support Policy for more information.

Licensing

The prebuilt IBM MQ Advanced image is eligible for container licensing if used on Kubernetes with the IBM License Service. If you are not employing Kubernetes orchestration (for example, using Podman or Docker), then you cannot take advantage of this optimized licensing model. See Container licensing FAQs for more details.

Supported CPU architectures

The prebuilt IBM MQ Advanced image is supported on amd64 and s390x z/Linux, and on ppc64le Power® Systems version 9 and above. Note that all containers which are part of the same queue manager (for example, Native HA replicas) must use the same CPU architecture.

Duration of support

Only the IBM MQ Advanced Continuous Delivery stream is supported. Each queue manager version is supported according to the normal support duration (one year).

Releases pro-actively receive security fixes until the next Continuous Delivery release. See IBM MQ FAQ for Long Term Support and Continuous Delivery releases for more information.

Fix availability

Periodic and interim fixes are available from IBM Container Registry.

Unavailable features

The following features of IBM MQ Advanced are not available with the prebuilt container image:

Replicated Data Queue Managers (RDQM) are not available - this feature is tightly coupled with the Linux kernel, so it not supported in containers
Linear logging for queue managers is not available
Specifying custom command line options for crtmqdir, crtmqm, strmqm and endmqm are not available — Most options can be configured using an INI file, however some cannot be configured, such as the use of linear logging.
Operating system (OS) users are not available
AMQP is not installed
MQTT is not installed
Managed File Transfer agent is not available. However, you can use the prebuilt container image to provide one or more Coordination, Command, or Agent queue managers.

If you want to use these features, you can build your own container image.