What’s In the Latest Update to PowerHA
July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
A handful of new capabilities have been released for PowerHA customers over the past few months, including support for asynchronous policy-based replication in FlashSystem, new administrative functions, support for SQL services, and the addition of new management functions in an updated Web interface.
As IBM notes in its announcement letter for IBM i 7.5 TR4, there is a long history of integration between PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i and IBM Spectrum Virtualize, the software for managing IBM FlashSystem SAN arrays. This tradition includes native support in PowerHA for various Spectrum Virtualize replication mechanisms, including Metro Mirror (synchronous replication), Global Mirror (asynchronous replication), LUN-level switching (switching between two SANs), and FlashCopy (point-in-time copies).
One of the big updates delivered recently in PowerHA is integration with Spectrum Virtualize’s asynchronous policy-based replication (PBR), a relatively new feature in Spectrum Virtualize that uses volume groups to automatically deploy and manage replication.
According to IBM’s FlashSystem documentation, PBR “significantly simplifies configuring, managing, and monitoring replication between two systems.” By using volume groups instead of consistency groups, “all volumes are replicated based on the assigned policy,” which “simplifies administration by removing the need to manage relationships and change volumes.”
IBM added support for policy-based replication (PBR) with a PowerHA update.
IBM delivered support for PBR with a March update to PowerHA. Brian Nordland, the Fortra product manager leading development of PowerHA at Fortra, described the benefits of this setup in a March 28 update:
“PowerHA automatically detects if replication is configured with asynchronous policy-based or consistency-group-based replication, enabling the use of the same configuration and management commands with minimal changes to the user experience,” Nordland writes. “In addition, it is possible to combine technologies, including LUN-level switching and PowerHA’s native FlashCopy integration and automation with policy-based replication.”
IBM (via Fortra) delivered this update in March with two new releases of the PowerHA software developed for IBM i 7.5 and 7.4, which are called IBM i 7.5 with HA version 5.5.2 and IBM i 7.4 with HA version 4.11.2, respectively. IBM bundled these PowerHA announcements up for its recent TRs, including IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10, but these PowerHA updates were delivered separately and before the TR announcement was made in May. The PBR update requires Spectrum Virtualize 8.6.2.0 or higher.
These two releases of PowerHA also brought a new feature to PowerHA’s administrative domain, which is used to synchronize security and configuration-related objects, like user profiles, job descriptions, and printer device descriptions, with other nodes in a PowerHA cluster.
With the March updates for PowerHA for 7.4 and 7.5, the administrative domain now includes support for synchronizing Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) version 3 attributes on printer device descriptions, including the SNMP user name (SNMPUSR) and SNMP context name (SNMPCNTX) attributes. IBM says the administrative domain will automatically begin monitoring the new attributes after all PowerHA nodes are updated.
IBM delivered another pair of PowerHA updates in June, including IBM i 7.5 HA 5.5.3 and IBM i 7.4 HA 4.11.3. These updates delivered several new features, including new management functions in the PowerHA Web interface, more enhancements to the administrative domain, and better support for SQL services.
On the Web interface, users can now use the GUI to start and stop cluster nodes; start and end administrative domains; add and remove monitored resources; start and end cluster resources groups; perform administrative switchovers and initiative failovers; and manage replication sessions, specifically by suspending, resuming, detaching, and reattaching replication. What’s more, users can now customize their Web interface by searching, sorting, filtering, and selecting columns for tables displayed on the screen.
This update marks a big moment for the PowerHA Web interface, Nordland said.
“It was initially released as something you could view things with, see the status of stuff,” the Fortra product manager told IT Jungle at the recent COMMON POWERUp conference. “Now if there’s a problem in your environment, let’s say there’s a network issue that caused replication to stop, now you can click a quick button and get things going again.”
IBM (via Fortra) also added a pair of new administrative domain functions, including better synchronization of resources when changes occur with adopted authority and enhancements that make it easier to add multiple user profiles based on selection criteria and with batch jobs.
Last but not least, the June PowerHA updates bring support for a pair of SQL services that pull up information about HyperSwap status.
PowerHA continues to provide additional SQL service as the strategic method of retrieving PowerHA information programmatically. In addition to providing the ability to see equivalent SQL queries for information presented via the web interface, PowerHA now has the ability to retrieve HyperSwap status information via SQL with two new SQL services. HyperSwap, of course, was introduced a decade ago to allow users to make it easy for users to move and restart LPARs almost instantly.
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