IBM announced IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 4 (TR4) and IBM i 7.4 TR10. PowerHA SystemMirror for i continues to announce enhancements with this release. Some of these enhancements are available today, and others are planned for June 14th, 2024.

Already Available (March PTFs)

IBM FlashSystem Asynchronous Policy-based Replication

PowerHA has a long history of integrating with IBM Spectrum Virtualize-based storage, including IBM FlashSystem, with built-in native support for technologies including Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, LUN-level switching, and FlashCopy.

With this enhancement, PowerHA adds integration with IBM Spectrum Virtualize asynchronous policy-based replication. PowerHA automatically detects if replication is configured with asynchronous policy-based or consistency-group-based replication, enabling the use of the same configuration and management commands with minimal changes to the user experience. In addition, it is possible to combine technologies, including LUN-level switching and PowerHA's native FlashCopy integration and automation with policy-based replication.

Enhanced Administrative Domain Integration

The administrative domain in PowerHA synchronizes security and configuration-related objects across a PowerHA environment, including user profiles, so that changes to resources monitored by the administrative domain are automatically synchronized with the other nodes.

The administrative domain now has the following enhancement:

• Support for synchronizing SNMPv3 attributes on printer device descriptions, including the SNMP user name (SNMPUSR) and SNMP context name (SNMPCNTX) attributes. Existing monitored resources in the administrative domain that previously monitored all attributes for printer device descriptions will automatically begin monitoring the new attributes after all nodes are updated to a PowerHA version supporting the new attributes.

Coming June 2024

Enhanced Administrative Domain Integration

The following additional administrative domain enhancements:

• Improved synchronization of resources when changes occur with adopted authority, reducing the need for manual intervention.
• The administrative domain makes it easy to add multiple user profiles based on selection criteria. This update simplifies the ability to omit IBM profiles when adding user profiles to the administrative domain. It is now also possible to add multiple user profiles in batch jobs with a new confirm parameter on the ADDCADMRE command to bypass the confirmation screens.

PowerHA Modern Web Interface

The PowerHA modern web interface with provides the ability to perform several management operations, including the ability to perform the following types of operations:

• Start and end cluster nodes
• Administrative domain management, including:
  • Start and end administrative domains
  • Add and remove monitored resources
• The ability to manage switchable environments, including the ability to:
  • Start and end cluster resource groups
  • Perform administrative switchovers and failovers
  • Manage replication sessions with the ability to suspend, resume, detach, and reattach replication.

In addition, the web interface has improved customization that enables searching, sorting, filtering, and selecting columns for tables within the interface with the ability to see dynamic SQL code that will generate a similar view.

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Thanks,
Brian Nordland
Associate Director of Development at Fortra
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