Virtual Gateways / Shared Queueing

[jxfish2]

To remove a single point of failure, I've been inquiring about methods to allow 2 or more queue managers, on different servers, to get messages from a shared queue...

1) Is there a way to create a single shared queue, which can be written to by our customers, where any one of my active Queue Managers can retrieve the messages?

I don't believe clustering (by itself) will solve my problem, as you still need one of the cluster servers to be defined as a gateway, which creates another single point of failure...

I'm told that Mainframes running MQ Series are capable of running a "Virtual Gateway", as well as "Shared Queueing"...

I want my "Trading Partner" to send its messages to a single "Virtual Queue", that I can access from any of my backend Queue Managers...

Our "Trading Partner" is setup in such a way as to have complete redundancy on their side of the equation...

I want to know how my partner can send their data to a single "address", which I can access from any one of my servers...

Is there a way to do this?

We are running on Mainframes...

TIA

Jxfish2

 

[mqonnet]

Well, you started off with saying you dont want clustering and ended with statement that says you want more or less what clustering has to offer. .

Under all circumstances you would end up having a single point of contact and hence single point of failure. Even in your "shared queue" concept(unless its os/390 which we would discuss in a bit), it again becomes a single point prone for failures.

I see 2 issues here. a) One to many relationship of queue to queue managers or applications. b) failover situation handling.

The solution which comes to my mind would be to have a hardware clustering for failover situations. As for having a single queue accessible by all queue managers, then there is no such "default" feature in MQ that you could use right away. Need to design one for yourself. Clustering resolves most of your issues, but you end up having a gateway queue manager.

On Os/390, MQ uses hardware to incorporate the feature "shared queues". And all queue managers access this queue. Shared queues are stored in a central db. This feature though is not available on any other platform that i am aware of.

Hope this helps.



Cheers
KK

 

[kevinf2349]

One potential solution could be clustering.

The manual to read is Queue Manager Clusters (SC34-5349-03)

Hope this helps