7.4 HA 4.3.1 & 7.2 HA 3.5 PTFs

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IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i 7.2 with HA 3.5 and 7.4 with HA version 4.3.1 brings a new set of enhancements centered around deployment, monitoring and usability that simplify the management of High Availability environments including:

• Simplified deployment - Significantly reducing the number of manual steps required to configure PowerHA

• Simplified management - Simplified commands with contextual f4 prompt options customized to the environment and status

• Health Monitoring Dashboards - See the health of the environment at a glance

• Geographic Mirroring RPO Information - Visibility to the real-time RPO for geographic mirroring environments

• SQL Services - New SQL services for PowerHA session information

Simplified Deployment

Deploying a PowerHA cluster has been greatly simplified in this release with automation and default settings which can be customized. The number of manual steps required to configure a PowerHA environment have been significantly reduced enabling a quicker and simpler setup.

Simplified Management

Continued simplified management of PowerHA with simplified commands that provide contextual F4 prompt options and prompting that are optimized to pertain to the specific environment and configuration.

Health Monitoring Dashboards

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PowerHA by design requires minimal ongoing monitoring, management, and maintenance. With the new dashboards, this ongoing monitoring is simplified even more. Dashboards enable administrators to see at-a-glance any errors or warnings that may affect their business continuity. These dashboards can be configured to show PowerHA information alongside information from other products and configure to show multiple PowerHA environments on one screen.

For additional information see: Health Monitoring Dashboards

Geographic Mirroring Real-time Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Information

One of the key metrics for a business continuity solution is Recovery Point Objective (RPO). A recovery point objective indicates how much data will be lost in the event of a disaster.

 For synchronous solutions in a PowerHA environment, such as synchronous Geographic Mirroring, the RPO is 0. However, synchronous solutions are limited in distance with maximum distances of around 300 kilometers. PowerHA enables replication to span the globe with asynchronous Geographic Mirroring. As with any asynchronous solution, the trade-off for greater distances is a larger RPO.

 With HA version 3.5 and 4.3.1 PowerHA now provides real-time RPO information on the display session screen for Geographic Mirroring. Regardless of if the delivery is synchronous or asynchronous, PowerHA is now providing information that estimates the impact of the network on the performance of Geographic Mirroring.

PowerHA SQL Services

PowerHA introduced support for SQL services earlier this year and is expanding this support to include SQL-based access for PowerHA session information, enabling clients to query information about the state of replication. The following new SQL Services are supported:

• QHASM.SESSION_LIST view

• QHASM.SESSION_INFO table function

Additional Enhancements

There are several other enhancements to PowerHA including: Easier to configure firewall security and Quality of Service (QoS) in a Geographic Mirroring environment with the ability to specify a port number for use by Geographic Mirroring.

For additional information on specifying a custom port number for Geographic Mirroring see:

Specifying Port Number Used by Geographic Mirroring

Enhancement Availability