Shared channels

In the queue-sharing group environment, WebSphere MQ provides functions that give high availability to the network. The channel initiator enables you to use networking products that balance network requests across a set of eligible servers and hide server failures from the network (for example, VTAM generic resources). WebSphere MQ uses a generic port for inbound requests so that attach requests can be routed to any available channel initiator in the queue-sharing group. This is described in Shared channels.

Shared outbound channels take the messages they send from a shared transmission queue. Information about the status of a shared channel is held in one place for the whole queue-sharing group level. This means that a channel can be restarted automatically on a different channel initiator in the queue-sharing group if the channel initiator, queue manager, or communications subsystem fails. This is called peer channel recovery and is described in Shared outbound channels.