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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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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Contestant

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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++ 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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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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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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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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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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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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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. 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.

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Hey Developers,

We're pleased to invite you to join the next InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 Tech Talk: DevOps on June 2nd at 10:00 AM EDT!

In this InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 Tech Talk, we focus on DevOps. We'll talk about InterSystems System Alerting and Monitoring, which offers unified cluster monitoring in a single pane for all your InterSystems IRIS instances. It is built on Prometheus and Grafana, two of the most respected open source offerings available.

Next, we'll dive into the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, a special controller for Kubernetes that streamlines InterSystems IRIS deployments and management. It's the easiest way to deploy an InterSystems IRIS cluster on-prem or in the Cloud, and we'll show how you can configure mirroring, ECP, sharding and compute nodes, and automate it all.

Finally, we'll discuss how to speed test InterSystems IRIS using the open source Ingestion Speed Test. This tool is available on InterSystems Open Exchange for your own testing and benchmarking.

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Hi Community!

Please find the Developer Community video of the week on the InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

Upgrades - Minimizing Business Disruption

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CrY-vPVcJdM
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Hi, Community!

Check a new session recording from Global Summit 2017:

Mirror, Mirror, Which Should I Choose?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/NmMfE14RdDs
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I had a question about using ZSTART, ZSTOP, and ZMIRROR.

  • If we use them and it is not correct, does it mess up with any of the existing functionality?
  • So, if I create a ZSTART with a simple command of starting the %JDBC Server will that mess up anything existing in the Startup sequence?
  • Is ZSTART, ZSTOP, and ZMIRROR just an extension of the existing functionality, or does it alter how the built in functionality runs?
  • Should we tread lightly in the use of them?
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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!

Please find the Developer Community Video of the week:

Failover for Cloud and Wide-Area Networks

https://www.youtube.com/embed/da-UegJsjO4
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Hi Community,

Enjoy watching the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

How to Migrate a Mirror Configuration to Apache - Linux Unix

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yqd-o1_uljc
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