You might have seen the recent exciting announcement that a new hardware model of the IBM MQ appliance, the M2004, is now available. There's more information about the new appliance in this blog post written by my colleague Alex. In this post, I'll cover the options available to migrate your data from your existing appliances to new M2004 appliances.
The migration process to a new appliance consists of the following two steps:
- Connect and complete the basic configuration of the new appliance.
- Migrate your queue managers to the new appliance.
The most common migration path to a new M2004 appliance is likely to be from an existing M2002 appliance. If this is the scenario that you're dealing with, then you have a few options to migrate your queue managers from your existing M2002 to your new M2004 appliance, which I'll describe below.
Configure your new appliance
The first thing you'll need to do, is to plug in and complete the initial configuration of your new M2004s. You might also need to copy over some configuration, such as user IDs, from your existing appliances. Since the new appliances run side-by-side with your existing appliances, you don't need to take any kind of outage yet. If you're migrating from a pair of M2002 appliances that are in a HA group, you can also create a HA group on your new pair of M2004 appliances at this point.
Migrate your queue managers
Once you've connected and configured your new appliances, you can then choose between the following options to migrate your queue managers to the new appliances:
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Back up your queue managers on your M2002 appliances using the mqbackup command, copy the backup file to the new appliances, then restore the backup using the mqrestore command. You don't have to stop the queue manager before taking the backup, but if you want to ensure that you have a consistent backup, and that persistent messages on your queues are processed exactly once by your applications, then you will want to stop the queue manager before taking the backup, and only restart the queue manager after restoring the backup on the new appliance.
This method is fairly simple and doesn't require any direct network connectivity between the old and new appliances, but does involve an outage of the queue manager while the queue manager backup is taken, data copied to the new appliance, and restored.
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If the queue managers on your M2002 appliance are configured for Disaster Recovery (DR), then you can use the replication technology on the MQ appliance to copy the queue manager to the new M2004 appliance. The procedure is to switch over the queue manager to the current recovery appliance, replace the appliance at the main site with a new appliance, switch over the queue manager back to the main site, then replace the recovery appliance with a new appliance. This does involve several queue manager restarts, but each outage should be quite short, and there's no need to manually copy data to the new appliances.
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Even if the queue managers on your M2002 appliance are not configured for DR, you can still make use of the DR replication technology on the MQ appliance to copy the queue manager data to the new M2004 appliance. You'll need to connect the DR replication network interfaces of the new and the old appliances first. By default, this is the eth20 10GB port. This can be as simple as connecting a network cable directly between the new and the old appliances, but the connection between the appliances can also go through network switches if that suits your environment better.
When you've set up the network connectivity between the old and new appliances, you can add the queue manager to DR control, with the queue manager on the M2002 appliance initially having the DR primary role, and the queue manager on the M2004 appliance having the secondary role. You'll need to stop the queue manager to add the queue manager to DR control, but it can be restarted afterwards, so this should be a brief outage.
Once you've configured DR replication for the queue manager, the queue manager and all its configuration and data, is automatically replicated from the M2002 to the M2004 appliance. You can then, at a convenient time, take a short outage of the queue manager to swap the DR roles on both appliances, so that the primary instance of the queue manager now runs on the new M2004 appliance. When you're happy that the queue manager has been successfully migrated to the new appliance, you can remove the queue manager from DR control on both appliances.
This method does involve a some initial network configuration, and a few queue manager restarts, however the overall queue manager downtime is minimised compared to the backup and restore method.
If you have a HA group on the new appliances, you can add the queue manager to the HA group once it's been been moved to the new appliance using any of these methods.
If you're migrating from an existing M2003 appliance to a new M2004 appliance you can also use the options above. You can also use secure backup and restore to more easily copy the configuration of the existing appliance to the new one. If you're migrating from a pair of existing M2003 appliances to a pair of new M2004 appliances in a HA group, then you also have the option of replacing one appliance at a time in the HA group, as described here.
Upgrading to MQ 10
One more thing to bear in mind when you migrate from an M2002 to an M2004 appliance is that your queue managers will be upgraded from MQ 9.4 to MQ 10 when they're migrated to the M2004. Take a look at What's new and changed in release 10.0.0 on the MQ appliance and What's new and changed in IBM MQ 10.0.0 to see the new features and changes in MQ 10 so that you're ready for this change.
More information
There's more information available about upgrading to new MQ appliance hardware in the MQ appliance documentation. The specific procedures that I've discussed in this post are described in more detail in: