There are many time in old Monty Python sketches where the number 3 seems to come up. There is a 3 headed giant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There is also a problem where King Arthur is trying to count to 3 to throw the ‘Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch’ but goes “1, 2, 5”.
As we move through the 2nd set of Continuous Delivery releases we are expecting to follow the same pattern for the 9.1.x releases as we did for the 9.0.x releases then we would anticipate that the final release will be 9.1.5, but we aren’t there yet. We have just announced MQ V9.1.3 on all platforms including the MQ Appliance. You can read the announcement letter for the distributed and Appliance offerings here. And you can read the letters for MQ z/OS here, and MQ z/OS VUE here. An important additional announcement to be aware of is that IBM is announcing withdrawal the separate MQ Advanced Message Security and MQ Managed File Transfer offerings on z/OS, with MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE being the recommended way to get these extended capabilities going forward.
For this blog I will call out a number of the key new features in MQ V9.1.3, and why I think they are important.
Let’s start with a feature that was first delivered in MQ V9.1.2, is of strategic importance and has been extended in MQ 9.1.3. This is a feature called Uniform Clusters and it allows MQ itself to balance application connections across multiple different queue managers. The initial release only supported this balancing for C applications and in this release the capability is extended to JMS applications. Why is this a useful feature? If you have multiple application connections to a set of queue managers, there is no easy way to ensure a fair distribution of workload across the queue managers. And then imagine what might happen if you remove or add queue managers for maintenance or to adjust available capacity. How can you rebalance workload, especially when new queue managers are being added? This feature allows MQ itself to be aware of the group of queue managers to spread the work across, and will take care of the balancing and rebalancing needed. As workload and queue managers become more dynamic with hybrid cloud deployments and containers, then this will become increasingly essential.
Recent releases over the last year or so have seen new feature enabling use of a REST API for admin, as well as also using REST for messaging. MQ V9.1.3 sees enhancements in both of these areas. The REST API for admin now allows calls to ‘runmqsc’ to use JSON inputs through the REST interface to return JSON output. The JSON input and output means that it will be much easier to send commands and to understand and take actions based on the output of the commands. This will help more customers and vendors build new tooling, or to update their existing tooling to be more powerful and dynamic and to use modern tooling frameworks.
REST Messaging offers the ability to send and receive MQ data without using MQ clients. Previously there was only the ability to use PUT and GET commands, but MQ V9.1.3 adds support to Browse messages.
New enhancements in MQ Advanced include a number of updates for the MQ MFT feature. One of these enhancements extends the FTP protocol bridge to now support FTP servers that run on the IBM i platform. With MQ Advanced V9.1.3, customers who use FTP to move files into and out of the IBM i platform can have them intercepted by the FTP Protocol Bridge and moved into the MQ network.
And for those increasing numbers of customers using MQ Advanced container images, in Kubernetes environments there is now the option to configure multi-instance queue managers with active and standby pods, or to use a single resilient queue manager with Kubernetes and system monitoring for high availability.
For the MQ Appliance there is a useful enhancement to the HA and DR functions that builds on the capabilities and enhancements previously available. Our MQ Appliance customers really appreciate the High Availability and Disaster Recovery configurations for the appliances. Now with MQ V9.1.3 notifications about HA and DR status, or changes in status are written to the MQ Appliance system log. In MQ V9.1.2, the MQ Appliance system log could be configured to stream off the appliance as with other MQ log targets. This combination of features would allow 3rd party monitoring tools to detect HA and DR status changes and rapidly alert MQ Appliance customers of failover activity. An additional feature of the latest MQ Appliance update is also to report on the data and time when data synchronization was stopped or lost between Appliances in a HA pair, or in a DR configuration. This will be useful for both offline analysis and for DR restart consistency.
Read the official IBM blog by Ian Harwood about the new release here.
This latest MQ V9.1.3 will be available to download on July 11th 2019. Are you ready for ‘3-dom’?
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