Re: H/A Replication Vendors and Temporal Tables

Rob,

There are 'Flavors' of PowerHA. One of them - GeoMirror uses internal disk and it's IBM i itself that is replicating the data. Which you chose depends on your needs, data size, and other factors. With SAN for example you can flash-copy but with internal disk you cannot.

With any flavor you can certainly switch over, do PTFs on production switch back, do PTFs on backup side. Or do the HA side first. Same with backups, upgrades. etc.

I have in fact used PowerHA to move customers from one server to another (Power7 to Power8) and upgrade from IBM i 7.1 to 7.2 in the process. At one customer we did this on three separate PowerHA 'pairs'. All went very very smoothly. No Save/Restore needed!


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 9/9/2016 8:24 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:

I wasn't aware they were a replication vendor.
Jim, I know that we've talked about my possible misconceptions before.
When I think about PowerHA I think it's more for hardware replication. You
store your data on a SAN and share it between two boxes. If you lose your
backplane or something else which rarely ever blows you fail over to the
other and keep on running.
I'm more concerned about putting PTF's, OS upgrade, etc on the backup,
bless that. Switch over to the backup, upgrade the primary, switch back.
We also do our daily backups from the backup and the primary only gets
backed up once a quarter.

We're currently not using SAN for our Power 8 boxes. Internal disk hosted
by an lpar of IBM i. Guest lpars are IBM i and AIX.


Rob Berendt