High Availability for WebSphere Message Broker & Websphere ESB

It’s important to consider how to ensure the performance and availability targets for a WebSphere Message Broker implementation are met. As the most common implementation of Message Broker is as a central hub that all messages in a messaging architecture are processed though, it is a potential bottleneck and single point of failure for the whole WebSphere MQ Queue Manager network.

Below the topology that I proposed and implemented in a lot of clients:

The diagram shows the topology. It consists of:

1. Two brokers BK.1 and BK.2. Each broker executes a specific set of execution groups that run each process in a specific set of flows parallelized or not.

2. Two Queue Manager WMB.BK1 and WMB.BK.2 corresponding respectively to BK.1 and BK.2 brokers.

3. A DB2 database dedicated hosting the configuration repository shared brokers.

4. The configuration manager CM to administer the two brokers.

5. The queue manager WMB.CM dedicated to configuration manager

We have also to consider the following points that contribute to high availability of any ESB environment. For example:

• Reliable hardware
• Shared queues
• Heath monitoring
• Failover clustering
• Online backup
• Dual networks
• Reliable operating system
• Online reconfiguration
• Fast reboot
• RAID disks
• Crash recovery
• Fast start up
• IP takeover
• Documented procedures
• Practicing procedures