Availability, backup, recovery, and restart on IBM i

Use this information to understand how IBM MQ for IBM i uses the IBM i journaling support to help its backup and restore strategy.

We must be familiar with standard IBM i backup and recovery methods, and with the use of journals and their associated journal receivers on IBM i, before reading this section. For information on these topics, see Backup and recovery.

To understand the backup and recovery strategy, you first need to understand how IBM MQ for IBM i organizes its data in the IBM i file system and the integrated file system (IFS).

IBM MQ for IBM i holds its data in an individual library for each queue manager instance, and in stream files in the IFS file system.

The queue manager specific libraries contain journals, journal receivers, and objects required to control the work management of the queue manager. The IFS directories and files contain IBM MQ configuration files, the descriptions of IBM MQ objects, and the data they contain.

Every change to these objects, that is recoverable across a system failure, is recorded in a journal before it is applied to the appropriate object. This has the effect that such changes can be recovered by replaying the information recorded in the journal.

We can configure IBM MQ for IBM i to use multiple queue manager instances on different servers to provide increased queue manager availability and speed up recovery in the case of a server or queue manager failure.

• Queue manager journals on IBM i
  Use this information to understand how IBM MQ for IBM i uses journals in its operation to control updates to local objects.
• Backups of IBM MQ for IBM i data
  Use this information to understand the two types of IBM MQ backup for each queue manager.
• Multi-instance queue managers on IBM i
  Multi-instance queue managers improve availability by automatically switching to a standby server if the active server fails. The active and standby servers are multiple instances of the same queue manager; they share the same queue manager data. If the active instance fails we need to transfer its journal to the standby that takes over so that the queue manager can rebuild its queues.
• Performance and disk failover considerations on IBM i
  Use different auxiliary storage pools to improve performance and reliability.
• Use SAVLIB to save IBM MQ libraries on IBM i
  

Parent topic: Administer IBM MQ for IBM i