Running an IBM i HA Switch Exercise This Weekend

This weekend, my shop is running an IBM I high availability switchover exercise.

We’re switching processing to go live on our backup box for four hours on Sunday morning, and bringing in 25 users to certify that the Capacity BackUp system (CBU) works correctly when filling in for our production box.

Essentially, we’ll be going live on the CBU for a short time.

In working with other shops, it always amazing how difficult it is to get a) users to come in and actually test whether your CBU can function as your production machine; and b) actually switch over to the CBU for live processing.

When I’ve talked with other shops, it’s always been a tightly controlled test pretty much with just the IT department and 1-2 users maybe. And vendors and business partners have confirmed my suspicion here. There’s something like 90% of IBM i shops who never do a live switch over and let’s users run with the box.

In our case, we do this user-based testing once a year and on occasion, we’ve even let production run on the CBU for a few days, most notably in 2010 where production ran on the CBU for a week straight.

So this is the drill for tomorrow. As I can, I’ll be posting some blogs on the process, what we’ve learned, and how it can valuable for other shops.

—Joe

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