One of our client is looking for hardware/software requirements to setup a webMethods71 Broker in Active/Passive mode in wM7.1.

Questions:

1. Is a Microsoft OS Clustering good enough to achieve a wM Broker Active/Passive Setup?
2. What are the best practices in setting up wM Broker Active/Passive mode?
3. Is it required to share/specific the same path "Broker storage " in all the broker server in the cluster.

KInldy request to advice


Warm Regards,
Gopinath K.M

yes works fine

There really isn’t much to this. Install the broker monitor and broker server on a drive mountable by both nodes and let the cluster software handle that for you. You may also want to use a virtual ip address as well, cluster software will handle that as well.

No sure what you are asking here. You can install multiple broker monitors and multiple broker servers and have them isolated from each if you want.

3. The broker storage drive/dir should be mounted only by the active node. This is what will keep proper state after a failover.

I would suggest not installing the binaries on the mountable volume. Place the binaries on dedicated volumes. Put the storage on a shared volume, mounted only by the active node. This approach allows you to upgrade the binaries with minimal interruption of service.

You may want to request the Broker clustering guide. Normally, a PS engagement is required (I don’t know why that is still a requirement) but you may be able to convince the right PS people to send it to you. If you have a TAM assigned, they may be able to facilitate.

That is the PS approach and I have used that, however the benefits did not always work out quite like that. I have since modify my installs to include everything on the shared drive. Separate the broker server binaries from the broker server monitor binaries gives you the benefit of upgrading broker server binaries independent of each other which is nice if you have multiple broker servers serving multiple IS instances.

You have to take an outage ultimately either way in order for the upgrade to take affect and since the upgrade is just a matter of lay down the new binaries I don’t and didn’t see the benefit in practice. The other issue I saw was that the broker server monitor didn’t always reread the configuration correctly when doing a failover which would lead to a broker server not starting correctly.

The other change is with 7.1.1 now has the ability to have multiple broker server monitors on the same server. You can now separate broker server monitors so you do not have to upgrade en masse to the latest version.

Just my two cents, I’ve done it both ways and tend to like the shared drive approach better. But your mileage may vary.

Definitely. Sometimes it is best just to schedule the outage.

Definitely. Good stuff!

Has anyone had success with placing the shared drive on network-attached storage (as opposed to SAN with fibre attachment) ?

Thanks a lot. With the above suggestion\info. My understanding as follows. Please correct if i am wrong. Also i am thinking to install the MWS Cluster in the same way.

Install Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on wMProdBr1 and wMProdBr2 with Micorsoft OS cluster “wMProdBr” enabled in Active/Passive mode.

In D:\ drive (Local Disk) install Broker Server and Monitor on server wMProdBr1
In D:\ drive (Local Disk) install Broker Server and Monitor on server wMProdBr2

In E:\ shared SAN Drive, this drive will be active at only in 1 server at any time which is active node in the cluster.

Share the below Dir "E:\wm71\Broker\data\awbrokers71\default" with all the below files

awbroker.cfg
awbroker.pid
BrokerConfig.qs
BrokerConfig.qs.log
BrokerConfig.qs.stor
BrokerData.qs
BrokerData.qs.log
BrokerData.qs.stor
diag.log
logmsgs

Is this correct approach ???

Please suggest or give comments on my understanding…

Thank you in Advance.

Warm Regards,
Gopinath K.M