Hi, one of our customer are thinking should they switch they current MQSeries enviroment on clustered one, for loadbalancing and failover switch reasons. But they are also considered about making kind of "manual" loadbalancing, where the MQS sender (requestresponse kind of messaging) application does the loadbalancing by itself by sending message in round robin kind of style to each configured QM's.
The reason for this is because they are little bit scared about possible difficulties in clustering enviroment. So question is what you think about is there ANY reason to start "inventing the wheel" again and do own lite version of loadbalancing or is the MQSeries own clustering really so difficult and hard to usemaintain ?
Joined: 20 May 2001 Posts: 107 Location: Zurich Financial Services
My recommendation would be to use clustering even though it may involve some pain in the process.
Doing it yourself at the application level is clumsy, time-consuming and error-prone. You would need to build a list of all potential qmgrs to connect to in turn. This list would need to be externalised from the application to allow it to be extended or altered. I guess you could build a layer between your real application and MQ so that this new layer does all the manual load-balancing.
You'd have to work out how to determine which qmgr wa the least busy. Presumably this would involve querying queue depths on all the qmgrs and then making a decision based on that. This code will take time to develop and test and then of course you are stuck with maintenance in perpetuity.
Clustering does this for you as well as vastly simplifying administration of large MQ networks.
Your question is a valid one as clustering is not for the faint hearted. However if you devote some time up front to understand how it really works and how to problem solve when things go wrong, then the benefits far outweigh the downsides.
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