In Episode 5 of Data Points, @Bob Binstock joins us to talk about mirroring databases for high availability in InterSystems products! Most of the discussion centers around this process in InterSystems IRIS, with a few notes about the differences when tackling it in HealthShare. Take a listen and let us know your thoughts!

Hi, simple mirror starting for first time, primary server give me : 

AddVirtualAddress failed, cannot become primary: Host at...

Some ideas to try ?

Working on RedHat 7 and Iris 2019.2
-Arbiter
-Primary
-Secondary
-Virtual IP

what is mirroring??

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a feature rich environment for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a cloud offering fully capable of supporting all of InterSystems products including the latest InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. Care must be taken, as with any platform or deployment model, to ensure all aspects of an environment are considered such as performance, availability, operations, and management procedures.  Specifics of each of those areas will be covered in this article.

Often InterSystems technology architect team is asked about recommended storage arrays or storage technologies.  To provide this information to a wider audience as reference, a new series is started to provide some of the results we have encountered with various storage technologies.  As a general recommendation, all-flash storage is highly recommended with all InterSystems products to provide the lowest latency and predictable IOPS capabilities.

The first in the series was the most recently tested Netapp AFF A300 storage array.  This is middle-tier type storage array with several higher models above it.  This specific A300 model is capable of supporting a minimal configuration of only a few drives to hundreds of drives per HA pair, and also capable of being clustered with multiple controller pairs for tens of PB's of disk capacity and hundreds of thousands of IOPS or higher. 

++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster. 

I have Ensemble/Healthshare running in a production environment which is setup with a mirror failover and an arbiter sitting between them.

In the event of a failover we have a number of connections that need stopping/monitoring and starting in a certain order.

Is there a programmatic way we can detect the failover and stop certain services and operations immediately and then start them up again in the required order, checking their connection state before starting the next connection.

I am thinking Ens.Director is probably what I need however I need some guidance on how to implement a solution.

Is it possible to make the cache terminal available over a mirrored vip address for a healthshare mirrored environment? So that connecting to a terminal for a mirrored environment will always connect to the Live Node?

I'm looking to write a Powershell script to run against the system and need to connect to the Live Node in a mirrored setup. Is this possible or am I going to have to log onto each node to establish which is Live.  Or does this even matter?

Greetings,

I'm pleased to invite you to InterSystems Developers Meetup being held in Cambridge on October  25^th at 5:30 PM at the Cambridge Innovation Center!

Hi Community! 

Check the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

Tier 1 Applications in a Virtual Environment

Check the new video on Developer Community YouTube Channel:

Mirroring - Architecting for Throughput 

In this video, learn how to provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) in diverse architectures that demand high performance, including replication over long distances.

Enjoy!

Hi All

I'm looking for some field experiences, lessons learned, or actual deployed solutions to the problem of replicating non-CACHE.DAT data in a mirrored Cache environment.  

Environment:

• Operating System is IBM AIX
• Hardware is IBM Power w/ virtualised storage
• Cache 2017.1
• 2x Production mirror members
• 1x DR mirror member

There are a number of different data types that we're looking at mirroring, and a number of identified solutions.

Hello everyone,

Currently we have 2 Windows servers in a clustered environment.  Is there a setting in HealthShare for a TCP/IP Operation to use the virtual IP address when initiating the connection, rather than the host IP address?  

Thanks in advance!

NB. Please be advised that PKI is not intended to produce certificates for secure production systems. You should make alternate arrangements to create certificates for your productions.
NB. PKI is deprecated as of IRIS 2024.1: documentation and announcement.

In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to Caché. The goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database.

looking for what the timeout value is for the connection for shadowing. and if it is known the timeout for mirroring also.

I'm currently getting this error and when we go to mirroring it would be good to know also, this way we can go back to our network vendor and give them as much info as possible.

10/19/16-12:19:40:696 (d30b6) 2 [SHADOWING] SHADOW SERVER (PRODSHAD): <ZREAD>ReadNone+3^SHDWUTIL;ERROR #1071: TCP read timed out - remote server is not responding (repeated 16 times)

thanks

Paul 

++Update: August 2, 2018

This article provides a reference architecture as a sample for providing robust performing and highly available applications based on InterSystems Technologies that are applicable to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare, TrakCare, and associated embedded technologies such as DeepSee, iKnow, Zen and Zen Mojo.

Azure has two different deployment models for creating and working with resources: Azure Classic and Azure Resource Manager. The information detailed in this article is based on the Azure Resource Manager model (ARM).

Hi,

I need to give an answer for a RFP where it'll be considered an extra to have a failover system where each member of the failover is located in a different datacenter, separated by more than 100-200 miles.

Presenters: Pete Greskoff, Sebastian Musielak
Task: Ensure high availability of your HealthShare deployments
Approach: Discuss high-availability options and focus on HealthShare’s new support for database mirroring
 

With the new release of HealthShare, Mirroring is now support for high availability. This session will describe high availability options and focus on mirroring your HealthShare deployments.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Ray Fucillo
Task: Provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) in diverse architectures that demand high performance, including replication over long distances
Approach: Give examples of mirror architectures in disparate environments, including geographically separated systems. Discuss performance considerations and advances in InterSystems’ mirroring technology
 

In this session you will learn about deploying Mirroring to provide HA and DR in diverse architectures that demand high performance and throughput. Challenges and solutions to achieving high throughput will be covered along with mirror architectures that involve long distances and disparate environments.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Mark Bolinsky
Task: Decide whether a converged infrastructure is ideal for your enterprise applications
Approach: Discuss best practices and provide guidance on the right questions to ask
 

The traditional use of “SAN storage” is no longer the only choice for deploying enterprise application. Software defined data centers are making inroads into enterprise data centers, and there is good reason for it. There is the potential for significant infrastructure cost savings, architecture simplification, reduced administration costs, and depending on the configuration - even better performance. This session will discuss some best practices and outline decision guidance to help you ask the right questions when considering hyper-converged architectures.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Murray Oldfield
Task: Deploy applications based on InterSystems’ technology using VMware.
Approach: Provide a checklist of factors to consider, particularly when deploying a production database application that requires high availability
 

Are you ready to deploy your applications on a virtualized architecture? This talk will highlight what you need to plan and do when deploying applications built on ISC data platforms using VMware. Special focus on what you need to know when planning for highly available (HA) production database applications.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Introduction

This document is intended to provide a survey of various High Availability (HA) strategies that can be used in conjunction with InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare Foundation. This document also provides an overview of the various types of system outages that can occur, as well as how each strategy would handle a given outage, with the goal of helping you choose the right strategy for your specific deployment.