In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

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As an IT and cloud team manager with 18 years of experience with InterSystems technologies, I recently led our team in the transformation of our traditional on-premises ERP system to a cloud-based solution. We embarked on deploying InterSystems IRIS within a Kubernetes environment on AWS EKS, aiming to achieve a scalable, performant, and secure system. Central to this endeavor was the utilization of the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) as our ingress controller.

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The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as compute resources, storage options, and networking that are delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. New services can be provisioned quickly, without upfront capital expense. This allows enterprises, start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses, and customers in the public sector to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly to changing business requirements.

Updated: 10-Jan, 2023

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++ 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.

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Article
· Aug 4, 2021 3m read
IRIS Mirror in the cloud (AWS)

I have been working on redesigning a Health Connect production which runs on a mirrored instance of Healthshare 2019. We were told to take advantage of containers. We got to work on IRIS 2020.1 and split the database part from the Interoperability part. We had the IRIS mirror running on EC2 instances and used containers to run IRIS interoperability application. Eventually we decided to run the data tier in containers as well.

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++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).

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Mirroring 101

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive, and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. Mirroring provides automatic failover under a broad range of planned and unplanned outage scenarios, with application recovery time typically limited to seconds. Logical data replication eliminates storage as a single point of failure and a source of data corruption. Upgrades can be executed with little or no downtime.

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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 InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. I did a similar post in the past for Caché, so feel free to check that out here if you are not running InterSystems IRIS. Much like the original, 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. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running. Example screenshots are taken on a 2018.1.1 version of IRIS, so yours may look slightly different.

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Regardless of whether an instance of IRIS is in the cloud or not, high availability and disaster recovery are always important considerations. While IKO already allows for the use of NodeSelectors to enforce the scheduling of IRISCluster nodes across multiple zones, multi-region k8s clusters are generally not recommended or even supported in the major CSP's managed Kubernetes solutions. However, when discussing HA and DR for IRIS, we may want to have an async member in a completely separate region, or even in a different cloud provider altogether.

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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.

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All pods are assigned a Quality of Service (QoS). These are 3 levels of priority pods are assigned within a node.

The levels are as following:

1) Guaranteed: High Priority

2) Burstable: Medium Priority

3) BestEffort: Low Priority

It is a way of telling the kubelet what your priorities are on a certain node if resources need to be reclaimed. This great GIF below by Anvesh Muppeda explains it.

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Mirror Outage Procedures

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. This article provides an overview of recommended procedures for dealing with a variety of planned and unplanned mirror outage scenarios.

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Some Usage cases

1. A deployment may consist of two high availability instances and two disaster recovery instances in a different data center.

The corresponding UAT environment could replicate this giving a total of 8 instances. How do you confirm CPF and Scheduled task alignment across ALL instances.

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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.

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Article
· Apr 25, 2023 12m read
Configuring Mirror in Docker

A common need for our customers is to configure both HealthShare HealthConnect and IRIS in high availability mode.

It's common for other integration engines on the market to be advertised as having "high availability" configurations, but that's not really true. In general, these solutions work with external databases and therefore, if these are not configured in high availability, when a database crash occurs or the connection to it is lost, the entire integration tool it becomes unusable.

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Hi Community!

Check the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

Tier 1 Applications in a Virtual Environment

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ftbfOyJfg5Y
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Announcement
· Oct 13, 2023
New Podcast Episode on Mirroring

Hi All! You may be interested to hear we've just released a new podcast episode all about mirroring, featuring conversations with @Chad Severtson from InterSystems and Greg King from J2. Take a listen and chime in on the conversation here if you have thoughts!

https://5e18edf067eb59-03854285.castos.com/player/1573650
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Question
· Nov 16, 2016
timeout value

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

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In Episode 5 of Data Points, @Bob.Binstock9141 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!

https://5e18edf067eb59-03854285.castos.com/player/159215
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Hi there,

I'm discovering IRIS and I need to POC the solution, with a constraint: containerization.
I'm used to deploy my apps in a Swarm cluster, and all my bind volumes are written on a GlusterFS volume.

The problem here, when I start my stack, the first log is:

[WARN] ISC_DATA_DIRECTORY is located on a mount of type 'fuse.glusterfs' which is not supported, consider a named volume for '/iris_conf'

And of course the deployment fails.

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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
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We are seeing more and more customers being lured with latest infrastructure technologies, particularly Composable Infrastructure. Coming with all sorts of data center consolidations and costs savings.

Question is: are there any concerns for HealthShare/TrakCare being run on these platforms or things to look out for? Anyone out there, already on these platforms?

To be more specific this is HPe Synergy with 480 Compute blades booting as bare metal.

Regards;

Anzelem.

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