Setting up a dormant CA 7 to avoid outages of a primary CA 7 instance

Products

• CA 7 Workload Automation

Issue/Introduction

We have a single CA-7 instance for our PROD environment that we have to shut-down and  startup on another system prior to IPL's to avoid an outage.  Is it possible to have two CA 7 instances running (i.e., active/passive) so that when one of the LPARs is IPL’ed, we no longer need to move our CA-7 instance to another LPAR?

Resolution

 The same instance of CA 7  can run on two lpars.  One instance will serve as the  primary and the other instance will serve as the backup. The backup instance is called a  dormant  instance of CA 7.  The primary CA 7  will run on one LPAR, then on another LPAR in the sysplex you will start the same CA 7 with a TYPE=DORM.  This will start the task, but it will not completely initialize. It will basically start and sit there waiting for an enqueue to be released which is currently held by the  primary  instance of CA 7.  When this enqueue is freed (when the primary goes down), the dormant copy will take over and initialize.  To implement this simply start CA 7 on the secondary LPAR with TYPE=DORM.   The command to issue the start is below: 

S CA7ONL,TYPE=DORM 

We recommend that you use the Datacom/AD  Shadow MUF facility. A Shadow MUF means that the database is available when an LPAR fails. Have the Shadow MUF execute on the system where the dormant copy of CA7ONL executes.

 

Additional information regarding the dormant copy of CA 7 can be found at the links below: 

Failover and Recovery for an Unscheduled Outage

 

Below is the link on managing CA 7

Manage CA 7