Upgrading hardware

There are different methods for replacing an IBM® MQ Appliance depending on whether it hosts standalone queue managers, or queue managers that are part of a high availability (HA) or disaster recovery (DR) configuration. For HA and DR configurations, you might be upgrading or replacing a single appliance, or the entire configuration, which will affect your choice of method.

Another key consideration is what type and duration of service outages are acceptable during your migration. In general, there is a trade off between simplicity and continuous availability.

The simplest (and preferred) method for upgrading or replacing a complete configurations, is by using the back up commands to create an archive and then restore the archive to your new hardware. This method requires you to stop each queue manager for a short period (an hour or so depending on size of the queue manager being relocated). This method can be used for standalone or for HA and DR configurations.

There are alternative methods for HA and DR configurations. Brief outages are always required when making major changes to HA or DR configurations, but the alternative approaches minimize these windows at the cost of more extensive manual intervention in the migration process (using DR or HA commands to fail queue manager over to another appliance while you replace the old appliance.)

Since there are many combinations of these factors, before proceeding with the upgrade or replacement, we recommend that you plan, document, and review the complete procedure that you intend to follow for your specific environment. However, a number of illustrative approaches, all using the standard IBM MQ Appliance administrative commands, are documented in the child topics.

New, M2002 appliances run version 9.1. If you are upgrading from a version 8 or 9.0 system, then you should also study the topics on firmware upgrades, see Upgrading a version 8.0 IBM MQ Appliance to version 9.1 and Upgrading a version 9.0 IBM MQ Appliance to version 9.1.