IBM Integration Bus

High Availability Overview

Peter Broadhurst
IBM Messaging & Integration
Introduction

These charts provide a high-level overview of IIB HA topologies:

• Comparison of active/active and active/passive HA

• Solutions for active/passive HA failover with IBM Integration Bus

• Solutions for active/active processing with IBM Integration Bus

• Adding Global Cache to active/active processing

• Combining all of the above

Only HTTP and JMS (MQ) workloads are shown

© 2013, 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 2

Active/active vs. active/passive

Scale High Availability Design Considerations

Active/Active All N instances contribute to New requests can be serviced Each instance must be able to
the processing capacity of immediately after the planned operate independently, without
the system or unplanned termination of relying on the availability of any
an active instance. other instance in the environment.

Often referred to as The order of processing for two

continuous availability. items of work cannot be
guaranteed, as there are multiple
instances that might perform each
item of work

Active/Passive Only one of N instances There is a failover period after An infrastructure for HA failover
contributes to the processing the planned or unplanned must exist, that ensures only one
capacity of the system termination of an active instance is ever activated, as well
instance. This failover period as detecting when one instance
commonly lasts for a small fails to initiate the failover.
number of minutes,
depending on the technology The active and the passive
used. system must have identical copies
of persistent data, such as
persisted transaction state, and
persisted messages. In IBM
Integration Bus this is achieved by
sharing a filesystem between the
two machines.

© 2013, 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 3

Active/passive high availability
HTTP workloads

Machine 1 Machine 2

IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node

WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget HA WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Integration Server failover Integration Server

MQ Messaging MQ Messaging

Shared
JMS workloads file system

• Single instance of the IIB runtime

• Single instance of all state
– Configuration, MQ messages and Transaction coordinator
• Highly available due to automatic fail-over. Two options available for HA failover:
– Out-of-the-box with Multi-Instance capability,
– Or using external HA cluster software

© 2013, 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 4

Option 1: Out of the box Multi-Instance failover

IP redirect (Gateway / Load Balancer)

Machine 1 – IP addr 1 Machine 2 – IP addr 2

IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node

Failover
WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Integration Server managed Integration Server
via
NAS file
MQ Messaging locks MQ Messaging

TC P
P/ P/I
IP Network-
JMS workloads attached TC
file system (NAS)

• IP address of each machine is different

– IP address redirect is required for HTTP workloads
– MQ client libraries automatically handle IP redirect for JMS workloads
• Requires highly available network-attached storage (NAS). Examples:
– IBM GPFS
– Veritas Cluster File System
– Highly available NFSv4
• More information on choosing a suitable NAS:
– https://ibm.biz/BdFxfz

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Option 2: HA cluster failover
HTTP workloads

IP addr
Machine 1 – IP addr 1 failover Machine 2 – IP addr 1

HA cluster Software HA cluster Software

Heartbeat
Healthcheck Healthcheck
IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node
Failover
WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Integration Server managed Integration Server
via
health
MQ Messaging checking MQ Messaging

Fib
e/S r CSI
Direct-attached / S
JMS workloads CSI file system i br
e
switched by HA F

• Allows use of direct-attached storage

• IP address failed over by HA cluster software
• Requires HA cluster software. Examples:
– IBM PowerHA (HACMP)
– Veritas Cluster Server (VCS)
– Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS)
– Red Hat Cluster

© 2013, 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 6

 Multi-instance or HA cluster?

Multi-instance queue manager

• Integrated into the IIB and MQ products
• Faster failover than HA cluster*
• Delay before queue manager restart is much shorter*
• Runtime performance of networked storage must be considered
• IP address of standby instance is different to primary
• No automatic fail-back to primary hardware when restored
• More susceptible to MQ and OS defects

HA cluster
• Capable of handling a wider range of failures
• Failover historically rather slow, but some HA clusters are improving
• Some customers frustrated by unnecessary failovers
• Require MC91 SupportPac or equivalent configuration
• Extra product purchase and skills required

Storage distinction
• Multi-instance queue manager typically uses NAS
• HA clustered queue manager typically uses SAN

© 2013, 2014 International Business Machines Corporation *depends on NAS file-system tuning and specific customer environment 7
Active/active topologies
HTTP workloads

Gateway / Load Balancer for HTTP workloads

IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node

WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Integration Server Integration Server

MQ Messaging MQ Messaging

Machine 1 Machine 2
JMS workloads

• Each Integration Node operates independently

• Continuous availability of the service during a failure
– Individual in-flight requests on the failed node receive errors, but the service stays available
• HTTP workloads require external workload balancing
– Hardware load balancer is the most common solution
• JMS workloads require load balancing
– Via an MQ cluster when remote applications have their own MQ queue managers
– Options for direct MQ client attachment (over TCP/IP) described here: https://ibm.biz/BdFxfS
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Adding Global Cache to active/active topologies

IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node

Global WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Cache Integration Server Integration Server

MQ Messaging MQ Messaging

Machine 1 Machine 2

• Highly available in-memory state store

– High performance compared to disk persistence (DB/MQ Messaging)
– High availability through redundancy – cannot be recovered if all nodes are stopped concurrently
– Built with WebSphere eXtreme Scale technology
• Alternative to using MQ or a Database for state storage/retrieval
– Correlation state between asynchronous request/reply flows
• Only needed if replies might be routed via a different runtime, otherwise simply use memory (LocalEnvironment etc.)
– Regularly accessed reference data, such as routing tables

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 Putting it all together HTTP workloads

Gateway / Load Balancer for HTTP workloads

IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node

WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Integration Server Failover Integration Server

MQ Messaging MQ Messaging
Global
Cache IIB Integration Node IIB Integration Node
WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget WESB
WESB AppTarget
AppTarget
Integration Server Integration Server

MQ Messaging Failover MQ Messaging

Machine 1 Machine 2

Shared
JMS workloads
Filesystem

• Active/active processing. HA fail-over for state and in-flight message recovery

• Individual queues/flows can be configured active/passive if required
– Single flow instance for message ordering or file-based processing
– Single correlation state queue shared between active flow instances

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More information

• Knowledge Center starting points:

IIB Active/passive HA: https://ibm.biz/BdFxfe
IIB Active/active HA for HTTP: https://ibm.biz/BdFxfb
IIB Global cache: https://ibm.biz/BdFxfp
MQ HA Cluster configurations: https://ibm.biz/BdFxf8

• Wiki article with detailed description of IIB topology choices

Tailored to customers migrating from WebSphere WESB, but useful to all
https://ibm.biz/BdFxfa

• MQDev blog on attaching MQ clients to active/active qmgrs:

https://ibm.biz/BdFxfS

• Testing and support statement for multi-instance

https://ibm.biz/BdFxfz

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