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#Mirroring

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Mirroring is an InterSystems technology for High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Database Backup and OLAP solutions.

Documentation.

Migrating InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health from on-premises to the cloud offers many advantages for Application Providers and Solution Providers. These advantages include simplified operations, access to flexible resources, and enhanced resilience. Companies no longer need to worry about the physical constraints and expenses associated with maintaining on-prem infrastructure, such as power and space requirements and expensive computer hardware.

One of the most compelling benefits is the ability to accelerate speed to market. By removing the burden of infrastructure maintenance, cloud environments enable faster development and deployment cycles, allowing businesses to respond quickly to market demands and opportunities. Operational costs are also lowered, because companies can scale resources up or down based on actual needs, leading to more efficient use of capital. Moreover, migrating to the cloud can contribute to a reduced carbon footprint by optimizing energy usage through shared cloud infrastructure.

Transitioning to the cloud may involve significant changes. Companies may benefit from a more operational focus, managing and optimizing cloud resources continuously. This shift may require changes to business models, reconsideration of margins, and strategies for scaling operations up or out. While requiring more investment, embracing these changes can lead to improved agility and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If you do not specify the option to remove the mirror attribute of the mirror database when deleting the mirror configuration, the database cannot be restored to a normal state and will be mounted read-only the next time it is mounted. To restore the database to a read-write state, you must remove the mirror attribute using the system routine ^MIRROR.

The procedure is as follows (execute in the %SYS namespace):

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Article
· May 24, 2024 15m read
VIP in GCP

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in GCP, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to GCP, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in GCP as subnets always span the entire region). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without using Load Balancers suggested in most other GCP reference architectures.

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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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Article
· Dec 19, 2023 8m read
VIP in Azure

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in Azure, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to Azure, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in Azure as subnets can span several zones). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without the using Load Balancers suggested in most other Azure reference architectures.

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Article
· Aug 28, 2023 3m read
IKO & The Compatibility Version Gotcha

With the world (as well as our own technology) moving to the cloud at such a fast pace it is easy (at least for myself) to get caught up in the little details. One thing I, and some clients of ours, had run into a couple of times was the necessity to specify the version of the images one plans to use with the IKO.

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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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Article
· Nov 4, 2022 9m read
VIP in AWS

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in AWS, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

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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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Purpose

Most CloudFormation articles are Linux-based (no wonder), but there seems to be a demand for automation for Windows as well. Based on this original article by Anton, I implemented an example of deploying a mirror cluster to Windows servers using CloudFormation.I also added a simple walk through.
The complete source code can be found here.

Update: 2021 March 1 I added a way to connect to Windows shell by public key authentication via a bastion host as a one-liner.

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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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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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Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

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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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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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++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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Presenter: Mark Bolinsky
Task: Provide failover for distributed systems without using a VIP
Approach: Demonstrate using InterSystems’ database mirroring with external traffic managers such as F5 LTM/GTM

With distributed environments and even public cloud environments, the use of a VIP sometimes is not desirable or even possible given network topology or deployment. The session will demonstrate integrating database mirroring with external traffic managers such F5 LTM/GTM using API based triggers in InterSystems products to interface with the F5 appliances. This not only presents automated redirection for the local mirror members, but also provided automated client redirection to asynchronous DR mirror members.

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

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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.

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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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Providing a reliable infrastructure for rapid, unattended, automated failover

Technology Overview

Traditional availability and replication solutions often require substantial capital investments in infrastructure, deployment, configuration, software licensing, and planning. Caché Database Mirroring (Mirroring) is designed to provide an economical solution for rapid, reliable, robust, automatic failover between two Caché systems, making mirroring the ideal automatic failover high-availability solution for the enterprise.

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Providing a reliable infrastructure for rapid, unattended, automated failover

Technology Overview

Traditional availability and replication solutions often require substantial capital investments in infrastructure, deployment, configuration, software licensing, and planning. Caché Database Mirroring (Mirroring) is designed to provide an economical solution for rapid, reliable, robust, automatic failover between two Caché systems, making mirroring the ideal automatic failover high-availability solution for the enterprise.

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