Benefits
There are two reasons for using clusters:
- Reduced system administration.
As soon as you start to establish even a small cluster you will benefit from simplified system administration. Establishing a network of queue managers in a cluster involves fewer definitions than establishing a network that is to use distributed queuing. With fewer definitions to make, you can set up or change your network more quickly and easily, and reduce the risk of making an error in your definitions.
- Increased availability and workload balancing.
Simple clusters give you easier system administration. Moving to more complicated clusters, offers improved scalability of the number of instances of a queue you can define, providing greater availability. Because you can define instances of the same queue on more than one queue manager, the workload can be distributed throughout the queue managers in a cluster.
These two objectives are discussed in detail in Chapter 2, Using clusters to ease system administration and Chapter 5, Using clusters for workload management.