What's new in IBM MQ 9.4.0 for Multiplatforms - Advanced entitlement only

IBM® MQ 9.4.0 delivers a number of new features that are available only with IBM MQ Advanced for Multiplatforms entitlement.

License entitlement, installation and upgrade

The following capabilities first appeared in IBM MQ 9.3.x Continuous Delivery releases and are new for Long Term Support at IBM MQ 9.4.0:

Native HA entitlement

Administration

The following capabilities first appeared in IBM MQ 9.3.x Continuous Delivery releases and are new for Long Term Support at IBM MQ 9.4.0:

The following capabilities are new for Long Term Support and Continuous Delivery at IBM MQ 9.4.0:

LZ4 compression now available for Native HA

License entitlement, installation and upgrade

Native HA entitlement: From IBM MQ 9.4.0, the Native HA high availability solution can be deployed in container-based queue managers in Red Hat® OpenShift® and Kubernetes v1.18 onward under the Advanced entitlement (in addition to IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration entitlement). For an introduction to this product feature, see Native HA.

Administration

Unlocking events from mission-critical data using Kafka Connect

The wide-spread use of IBM MQ means that it is a great route for getting data into Kafka for example, by taking a copy of existing data with streaming queues. From IBM MQ 9.4.0, if your enterprise has IBM MQ Advanced for z/OS® Value Unit Edition entitlement, IBM MQ Advanced for Multiplatforms entitlement, or IBM MQ Appliance entitlement, you get access to IBM provided, and supported connectors that can copy data from IBM MQ to Kafka, or Kafka to IBM MQ. Previously, you could get the connectors for free without support, or obtain support with IBM Event Streams entitlement. For more information, see Kafka Connect scenarios.

The IBM MQ Kafka version 2 connectors provide exactly-once message delivery. This significant enhancement means that failures in either IBM MQ, the IBM MQ Kafka Connectors or Kafka do not result in duplicate messages in either IBM MQ or Kafka. For more information, see Exactly once support.

Autorecovery of damaged objects for Native HA queue managers

From IBM MQ 9.4.0, if a Native HA queue manager detects any damaged objects when it starts, it automatically attempts to recover those objects.

For more information, see Recovering damaged objects.

Media image scheduling - replicated logging

From IBM MQ 9.4.0, changes have been made to the way in which the scheduling of media images is calculated. Where automatic media imaging is enabled, the frequency with which media images are taken is controlled by the IMGLOGLN and IMGINTVL queue manager parameters. Now, even when IMGINTVL specifies that it is time for an image to be taken, if no significant amount of work has been performed since the last image was taken, no new image is taken. This prevents the unnecessary use of computing and network time on writing to logs when little or no information has changed.

When Native HA queue managers are created, the value of IMGLOGLN is now set to a value calculated to be 25% of the available log space. This lessens the likelihood of the attempt to take a media image occurring when log space has been exhausted.

For more information, see Managing log files and ALTER QMGR (alter queue manager settings).

RDQM available on RHEL 9

From IBM MQ 9.4.0, you can install RDQM on RHEL 9, see Installing RDQM.

You can also migrate an existing RDQM configuration from RHEL 7 or RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 by recreating your cluster, see Migrating replicated data queue managers.

Managed File Transfer enhancements for resource monitors and fteRAS

IBM MQ 9.4.0 adds three additional Managed File Transfer resource monitor verbose level logging events related to connecting and disconnecting from a queue manager. For more information, see Logging MFT resource monitors.
From IBM MQ 9.4.0, you can collect troubleshooting information (MustGather data) for a specific Managed File Transfer agent or agents instead of for all agents on the system. You do this by running the fteRAS command with the -agents parameter. The introduction of the -agents parameter reduces the amount of time that it takes to gather troubleshooting information if the data that you need to investigate a problem is for a specific agent or agents. Before IBM MQ 9.4.0, fteRAS collects the entire data for the Managed File Transfer installation on the system, even if the data needed for investigation is for a specific agent. If there are a large number of Managed File Transfer agents configured on a system, the fteRAS command can take a long time to complete and the large zip files that it outputs take additional time to upload. For more information, see fteRAS (collect MFT troubleshooting information).

LZ4 compression now available for Native HA

LZ4 compression can now be specified to implement a fast, lossless algorithm to compress data being sent on a network. You can choose to prioritize speed or compression when you specify LZ4 compression. See NativeHALocalInstance stanza of the qm.ini file.