Installation considerations

During the initial configuration, you are prompted for supported operational modes and the password for the admin account.

Operational modes

Depending on the product license purchased, the IBM® MQ Appliance can operate in one of two modes:

• IBM MQ Appliance M2002A is aimed at larger enterprise workloads.
• IBM MQ Appliance M2002B is designed to meet the needs for smaller workloads and offers a lower processing capability and less disk capacity.

You can verify in IBM Passport advantage which product license you have purchased for your appliance.

The first time that you power on the IBM MQ Appliance, you are asked to confirm which license you have purchased. The appropriate appliance mode is then applied. Please take care when making this choice. If you accidentally configure this setting incorrectly, you must apply a factory reset to the appliance or contact IBM Support.

Once configured you will not be asked again as the appliance mode has now been selected. The mode is indicated in the LCD panel on the front of the appliance and the welcome banner when logging in to the IBM MQ Appliance CLI.

If you later require more capacity, you can purchase an upgrade to convert an M2002B appliance to an M2002B+ appliance, which has the same capacity as an M2002A appliance.

Upgrading from an M2002B to M2002B+ does not require a factory reset or loss of queue manager data, but does require a reboot of the appliance for the update to take effect. Full instructions for this process are supplied on purchase of the upgrade part through passport advantage.

You can view which mode is currently operational on the appliance in the following ways:

• By viewing the LCD display panel on the front of the appliance.
• In the welcome banner when you start the command line interface.
• By using the show system command (reported as Capacity mode). See show.
• In the System Setting panel of the appliance Web UI (displayed as Licensed capacity mode).
• By using a REST API command to show system settings. See REST management interface.

Password for the admin account

The first time that you start the appliance from a serial connection is different from any subsequent restart.

• On the first start, you must initialize the appliance. The initialization routine prompts you to accept the license agreement and change the password for the admin account. After initialization, create a user with a group-defined account type with the appropriate access policy or the privileged account type as a backup for the admin account. A privileged user or a group-defined user with the appropriate access policy can log in and reset the password for the admin account.
• On subsequent restarts, you are prompted for the credentials of the admin account or another local account. If that account has an expired password, you are prompted to change the password.

Attention: If you forget or misplace the password for the admin account, you must return the appliance to IBM to reset the password. However, when another account can log in and has appropriate permission, that user can reset the password for the admin account.

When you receive the appliance after a password-reset, you must initialize the appliance again with an initial firmware setup. Therefore, none of your configuration data is on the appliance.

License agreement

During initialization, you must configure the web management service to prepare for accepting the license agreement through the GUI. When the admin account logs in to the GUI for the first time to verify the appliance configuration, the GUI displays the license agreement.