Relocating your appliances
How you should plan for relocating appliances to a different data center.
The main consideration when relocating appliances are network related. If moving data centers means using different IP addresses for appliance interfaces, then you have some reconfiguration tasks to complete in addition to physical relocation.
High availability and disaster recovery configurations
If the appliances being relocated use the high availability (HA) or disaster recovery (DR) capabilities of the IBM® MQ Appliance and the appliance IP addresses will change then you must delete and recreate the HA and DR configurations. The HA and DR configuration should be removed before powering off the appliances at the old site (see Deleting a high availability group and Removing a queue manager from a disaster recovery configuration by using the command line). The queue managers themselves do not need to be deleted. You can then set up HA and DR again at the new site after you have reconfigured the network interfaces. If you use HA and do not remove the HA configuration before powering off the appliances then it is likely a partitioned (split-brain) scenario will occur when you power them back on at the new site, because the appliances cannot communicate with each other.
For help with changing IP addresses in HA configurations, see Changing IP addresses in high availability configurations. For help with changing IP addresses in DR configurations, see Changing IP addresses in disaster recovery configurations.
If the IP addresses are not changing, and will be the same at the new site, then the HA and DR configurations do not need to be removed before relocation. However, one appliance in each HA group should be suspended before the appliances are powered off to prevent split-brain occurring if the appliances are unable to communicate when they are first powered on at the new site.
Channels and listeners
From the perspective of IBM MQ, if queue manager channels or listeners are configured to bind to a specific local IP address (such as a HA floating IP address) then they will need to be updated to use the correct IP address at the new site. For channels, the LOCLADDR attribute is used to bind to a local IP address. For listeners, the IPADDR attribute is used.
Applications and remote queue managers
Applications or remote queue managers that connect to the appliances will need to be updated to use the new IP addresses if DNS entries are not used and updated accordingly.
Other systems
If the appliances or the queue managers are configured to connect to external systems, such as an LDAP server for authentication/authorisation, or monitoring tools such as a syslog or SNMP server, then these settings must also be reviewed and updated if necessary.