On 30th June, 2020 IBM officially launched the latest DB2 release, DB2 Nebula 11.5.4. The Triton midrange team has been exploring some of the exciting features that the new release has to offer. In this series of blogs we take a look at our DB2 11.5.4 feature highlights and include our initial first impressions.
In the second in our series Damir Wilder looks at Automating HADR failovers with Pacemaker.
DB2 Nebula: Automating HADR failovers with Pacemaker
My favourite new feature in the latest DB2 edition 11.5.4 (code named Nebula) is Pacemaker.
Pacemaker is an open-source, high availability cluster manager software integrated with DB2 Advanced Edition and DB2 Standard Edition on Linux (no support announced for AIX/Windows). It provides high availability and disaster recovery capabilities for on-premises deployments and non-container cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Service (AWS). And it is meant as the replacement for the old TSAMP technology.
Those who have ever tried to automate the HADR failovers in the past, using TSAMP as the cluster manager, know how cumbersome this technology is and how difficult it has been working with it. In my personal experience, it got stuck or corrupted many times so thoroughly that the only way to fix the problem was to completely remove the cluster (i.e. drop the TSAMP Domain) and recreate it from a scratch. This is hardly a practice suitable for production environments, the native ground for TSAMP. In some cases it was actually easier to drop TSAMP altogether and live on without the automated failovers.
Therefore I have high hopes for Pacemaker, in that it will offer us a much simplified and easier way of managing HADR clusters and automating the failovers between the HADR nodes. The caveat is that Pacemaker is only a ‘Technical Preview’ in DB2 v11.5.4, meaning that its usage should be restricted to non-production environments (as ‘things might change in future releases’). But this will not prevent me to test it out as soon as possible and share my experiences in another blog article!
For more detailed information download my latest ebook, DB2 HADR Automation with Pacemaker.
