Configuring high availability

You can configure a pair of appliances to provide a high availability (HA) solution.

For more information about HA on the IBM® MQ Appliance, see High availability.

To configure HA for a pair of appliances, you must complete the following steps:
  1. Connect the appliances together. For more information, see Configuring the hardware for high availability.
  2. Create an HA group for the appliances. For more information, see Configuring the high availability group.
  3. Create HA queue managers on the appliances. For more information, see Configuring high availability queue managers.

Messaging users that connect to HA queue managers must be recognized on both appliances in the HA group. You can use an external LDAP directory to store details of messaging users, which can be accessed by both appliances in the HA group. Otherwise, you must set up local messaging users on both appliances.

You connect your applications to HA queue managers by using IBM MQ clients that connect to the appliance. You can define a single, floating IP address that is used to connect to a queue manager on either of the appliances in the HA group (see Specifying a floating IP address for a queue manager). Alternatively, you can manually configure your client applications to attempt to connect to the HA appliances using their static IP addresses in your preferred order. You configure this by using the usual MQ channel connection mechanisms. For guidance on how to connect clients to queue managers, see Channel and client reconnection in the IBM MQ documentation.