Uniform clusters: Planning considerations

Uniform clusters remove some of the manual steps an administrator has to go through to create and administer a group of independent, interconnected queue managers. They move some client connection logic from the client to the queue manager, where information about levels of application activity can inform decisions at the clients, as to which queue managers they should connect to.

Uniform clusters are not available on IBM MQ for z/OS ; queue sharing groups provide many of the capabilities of a uniform cluster.

Uniform clusters differ from typical IBM MQ clusters in the following ways:

• Uniform clusters typically have a smaller number of queue managers in the cluster. We should not create a uniform cluster with greater than 10 queue managers.
• Every member of the cluster has near-identical configuration.
• The cluster is typically used by a single application, or group of related applications.
• The number of application instances connecting to the cluster should be greater than, or equal to, the number of queue managers.

  There should be a good balance between the putting and getting applications.

To take full advantage of a uniform cluster, each application should also be scaled into multiple matching instances, preferably with at least as many instances as there are queue managers, if not many more.

We can simplify both creating a uniform cluster, and subsequently keeping the configuration between the uniform cluster members identical, by using the automatic configuration and automatic clustering support.

For a more detailed introduction, see About uniform clusters

Parent topic: Designing clusters