High Availability Clustering, Data Replication
and Disaster Recovery for WebSphere MQ

WebSphere MQ from IBM provides reliable and guaranteed delivery of messages
between applications across a wide range of platforms. The core element of
WebSphere MQ’s architecture is the queue manager which handles all message
storage, delivery timing, event triggering and other functions not directly related to
actual movement of data. Each queue manager may control multiple queues and
provides reliable message storage and transport abstraction. Given its critical
function within a WebSphere MQ deployment, ensuring continuous availability of the
queue manager is critical to application and service uptime.
LifeKeeper for WebSphere MQ provides fault resilient protection for WebSphere MQ
queue managers and queue manager storage locations including the command
server, the listener and persistent queue manager data. LifeKeeper ensures that
failures on a primary WebSphere MQ server or within a queue manager are
automatically detected and corrected to ensure no disruption to message delivery as
a result of application, network or hardware failure.

LifeKeeper detects failures at two levels. Server health is monitored via a persistent
heartbeat mechanism among cluster members while individual resources are
monitored through daemons which continuously check the health of WebSphere MQ
services. Recovery can be configured to take place either on the same primary
server via a local restart action if possible or to a designated backup server via
automated failover. Recovery occurs with minimal downtime and without any human
intervention.
With LifeKeeper, WebSphere MQ is fully protected and applications are always
available.

Key Features:

• Support for 32bit and 64bit platforms including IBM pSeries
• Support for leading OS platforms
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Novell SUSE
• VMware ESX Server
• Active/Active and Active/Standby configurations
• Automated protection at both server and resource level via monitoring of WebSphere MQ daemons
• Can be used in shared storage, replicated storage or Network Attached Storage configurations
• End to end application health check via server and client connect
• Complete MQ protection including:
• Optional PUT/GET tests
• Listener process checks
• Supports both LINEAR and CIRCULAR logging
• Easier debugging via customizable logging levels
• Easily protect custom applications via the use of LifeKeeper Extender
• Monitoring and recovery also available for SAP, DB2, Oracle, MySQL, IBM Director, Rational
ClearCase, Apache, NFS, LVM, and other enterprise apps