Clustering

This topic provides guidance for planning and administering IBM® WebSphere® MQ clusters. This information is a guide based on testing and feedback from customers.

The following information assumes that the user has a basic understanding of IBM WebSphere MQ clusters. This information is not intended as a one size fits all solution, but is instead trying to share common approaches to common problems.

Clusters provide a mechanism for interconnecting queue managers in a way that simplifies the initial configuration required to set up the system and the ongoing management required. The larger the configuration, the greater the benefit.

Care is required in planning clustering systems to ensure that they function correctly and to ensure the levels of availability and responsiveness required by the system, especially for larger or more complex clustered systems.

A successful cluster setup is dependent on good planning and a thorough understanding of IBM WebSphere MQ fundamentals, such as good application management and network design. Ensure that you are familiar with the information in Concepts of intercommunication and How clusters work .

What are clusters and why are they used?

Clustering provides two key benefits:
  • Clusters simplify the administration of IBM WebSphere MQ networks which usually require many object definitions for channels, transmit queues, and remote queues to be configured. This situation is especially true in large, potentially changing, networks where many queue managers need to be interconnected. This architecture is particularly hard to configure and actively maintain.
  • Clusters can be used to distribute the workload of message traffic across queues and queue managers in the cluster. Such distribution allows the message workload of a single queue to be distributed across equivalent instances of that queue located on multiple queue managers. This distribution of the workload can be used to achieve greater resilience to system failures, and to improve the scaling performance of particularly active message flows in a system. In such an environment, each of the instances of the distributed queues have consuming applications processing the messages.