Support for the IBM MQ Operator

The IBM® MQ Operator is supported as part of IBM MQ, IBM MQ Advanced, and IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration

Supported platforms

The IBM MQ Operator is supported on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform and Amazon EKS.

Releases of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform are no longer supported by IBM MQ after Red Hat stops support. See Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Life Cycle Dates for more details.
Releases of Amazon EKS are no longer supported by IBM MQ after Amazon stops both standard and extended support. See Understand the Kubernetes version lifecycle on EKS for more details.

For more information, see the Containers tab of the relevant IBM MQ system requirements page.

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.

Supported CPU architectures

The IBM MQ Operator is supported on amd64 and s390x z/Linux, and on ppc64le Power® Systems version 9 and above. Note that all nodes in a Red Hat OpenShift or Amazon EKS cluster must use the same CPU architecture.

Duration of support

IBM provides defect and usage support for the IBM MQ Operator and the associated queue manager images.

There are two types of release for IBM MQ in containers: Container Long Term Support (Container-LTS) and Continuous Delivery (CD). See IBM MQ release types and versioning for how to distinguish release versions, and details of support duration.

For CD releases, security fixes are pro-actively applied until the next CD release level. After the next CD release, on request IBM will assess the feasibility of making reasonable efforts to provide a fix on the previous CD release level.

See IBM MQ FAQ for Long Term Support and Continuous Delivery releases for more information on support, and Lifecycle dates for IBM MQ in containers for specific dates.

Fix availability

Periodic and interim queue manager fixes are available from IBM Container Registry. Interim fixes for the IBM MQ Operator are not available.

Unavailable features

The following features of IBM MQ Advanced are not available for queue managers operated by the IBM MQ Operator:

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 IBM MQ Operator to provide one or more Coordination, Command, or Agent queue managers.
Native HA In-Region Replication (IRR) is not supported
Advanced Message Security with MCA interception using a separate key store is not available. MCA interception can still be configured to use the main queue manager key store.

You can only use the queue manager container images supplied by IBM with the MQ Operator, and cannot build your own image with custom code. The exception to this is to add a container image layer to an IBM-supplied image, in order to add configuration files or exits.