Tips To Ensure Your IBM I System Remains Online On Crisis

Unexpected application downtime results in a loss of money, company, or reputation for the vast majority of businesses. Companies desire dependable hardware for their IT infrastructure, but you can’t entirely prevent server or application downtime no matter how stable your gear and software are. To reduce downtime, you must install a high availability (HA) solution.

IBM’s Solution

Fortunately, IBM launched high availability cluster multiprocessing (HACMP) on its AIX RS/6000 computers thirty years ago to address this issue. In the simplest definition, a cluster is a collection of two or more systems. When one system fails, the other automatically takes over. Although there is an application outage, recovery is automatic, and downtime is mostly determined by the time it takes for the programmes to recover/restart. HACMP/PowerHA® was a great method to go back when there were no storage area networks, IP aliases, or virtualized computers.

The HACMP software has been renamed PowerHA SystemMirror® and is still widely used on the latest IBM Power Systems. However, IBM debuted Live Partition Mobility (LPM) fourteen years ago. LPM allowed customers to migrate completely virtualized AIX computers across actual hardware servers while keeping their applications running. Finally, in terms of high availability, this is a game-changer.

Organizations utilising IBM Power Systems servers can deploy redundant network adapters, redundant host bus adapters (HBAs), redundant virtual input/output (VIO) servers, and other hardware to avoid SPOFs at the physical server level (frame). However, there is always the possibility of the entire frame collapsing.

Local HA systems such as IBM PowerHA, Oracle RAC (for Oracle database servers), SUSE-HA (for SUSE Linux), and others, can be used in such settings. Clients employ disaster recovery solutions to deal with complete data centre failure.

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High Availability VM Recovery Manager (VMRMHA)

For high availability, VMRMHA uses LPM simplified remote restart (SRR) technology. A user who uses VMRMHA can create a HA environment for all virtual machines on an IBM Power® server, not just selected ones. This also applies to Linux and IBM i virtual computers.

One disadvantage of VMRMHA over PowerHA is that following an OS crash, the operating system must boot on a new physical server, and the application must then restart. Only the programme must restart in a PowerHA environment.

However, VMRMHA has an advantage over PowerHA in that – it does not require the maintenance of a “cluster of two AIX servers.” For more details, please visit vofox.com.