In August we released the IBM MQ Appliance M2003. At the same time, we also released the 9.3.0.0 long-term support (LTS) firmware, which is the minimum firmware version that is supported by the M2003. The 9.3.0.0 firmware was released with a couple of important restrictions:

• The 9.3 firmware was initially only available for the new M2003 hardware model.
• The 9.3 firmware will not support the M2001 hardware model, which has an end of support date of 10 July 2023. The 9.2.0 long-term support (LTS) and 9.2.5 continuous delivery (CD) firmware releases will be supported on the M2001 hardware until that date to ensure that a supported firmware remains available.

We are pleased to announce that the 9.3.0.1 firmware update (fix pack) is now available, which supports both the M2002 and the M2003 hardware models. With this firmware update users of the M2002 appliance can now access all of the capabilities that are included in the 9.3 long-term support release, including:

• Newly designed look and feel for the web management interface (UI)
• Streaming queues for insight into the data flowing through MQ
• Encrypted file systems to protect IBM MQ data at rest
• Synchronous replication for disaster recovery (DR) between two appliances
• Simplified administration for high availability (HA) resource failures
• Retrieve HA and DR configuration settings using REST
• Process dead-letter queues by using a remote client DLQ handler

For M2002 customers, there are some important restrictions and notes about upgrading to the 9.3 firmware:

• You can only upgrade an M2002 appliance to 9.3 from IBM MQ 9.2.0 LTS or IBM MQ 9.2.5 CD firmware that includes APAR IT41539.
• Upgrading an M2002 appliance to 9.3 is a one-way operation. After you have upgraded to 9.3 you cannot revert to 9.2.
• An M2002 appliance will restart several times during the upgrade as hardware component firmware is also updated - the upgrade takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.
• Firmware updates can usually be rolled back, so to perform and acknowledge this one-way upgrade an additional confirmation prompt is output when using the boot image command.
• A two-stage migration is required for HA queue managers, as per some previous upgrades. HA queue managers will have a status of Migration Pending until the sethagrp command is used to complete the migration process.

Additional information

Upgrading the IBM MQ Appliance firmware from version 9.2 to version 9.3
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/mq-appliance/9.3?topic=inf-upgrading-mq-appliance-firmware-from-version-92-version-93

How to download IBM MQ 9.3.0.1
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/downloading-ibm-mq-9301

APAR fixes included in 9.3.0.1
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/fix-list-ibm-mq-version-93-lts#9301

APAR IT41539 for 9.2.0 LTS and 9.2.5 CD
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/IT41539

IBM MQ Appliance M2003 is available
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/integration/blogs/jamie-squibb1/2022/08/02/ibm-mq-appliance-m2003-is-available

IBM MQ Appliance firmware lifecycle
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/lifecycle/search/?q=mq%20appliance

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