IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, March 2009 - 48

Tips & Techniques Since your systems must be in a dedicated state during the setup, it’s possible to spread the setup over days or even weeks, a few hours at a time. up your solution is an invasive process that will change system values and migrate production data into your IASP. None of these steps can be done while your systems are in production. Additionally, HASM deletes libraries and IFS directories migrated into the IASP from your backup systems as a part of the migration process. Setting up an HA solution essentially creates a single system image on every system in the HA environment based on the contents of the primar y system at the time of the setup, so take care to have current backup copies of your systems before proceeding with the setup. Actually setting up your HA solution is straightforward and accomplished by clicking “Go” from the main HASM setup page for each step in the process. This displays a page with a list of IBM i commands that will be executed and the projected time for each step. When you click “Run Now,” the commands shown in the steps start to execute and the resulting messages from running the commands will be displayed in the message area at the bottom of the page. If an error stops a step, you’ll be able to go back and undo all of the previously completed steps by clicking “Undo,” or you can proceed to retry the failing step and continue with the rest of the setup commands. This capability to go forward or backward makes setting up your HA solution adaptable to your needs. Since your systems must be in a dedicated state during the setup, it’s possible to spread the setup over days or even weeks, a few hours at a time. The process lets you do a couple of steps and then go back into production mode. At the end of each setup step, you should be able to return to production mode and run your business as before. In other words, your primary system continues to be just as available as it was before, however, it will not be highly available until all of the setup steps are complete. Figure 3 Manage Your HA Solution After setting up your HA solution, clicking “Manage your high availability solution (license required)” will show a dashboard view of your solution (Figure 6, page 50), making it easy to monitor how things are going and to take action when needed. This page is organized as a dashboard, with three distinct areas to provide just the right level of detail for any situation. It automatically refreshes every 10 seconds and so is meant to be displayed for long periods, catching your attention only when changes occur. At the top of the page, you’ll see an area focused on the overall status of your HA solution. Colored icons indicate when you’re highly available (a green icon), when you’re temporarily not highly available (a yellow warning icon) and when you’re not highly available and some user action is required to make you highly available again (red error icon). When you’re not highly available, both messages and Figure 4 48 MARCH 2009 ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi

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IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, March 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, March 2009