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Status Not under consideration
Workspace Db2
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 11, 2015

Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) should be supported by (RIMS)

Headline cont... DB2 9.7 to stop/start the instances instead of using db2fmcd/db2fmd. Description- Following is a request I received a few months ago. I did than classify the request as one that would never happen, but it turned out customer insist to have this change considered. Hence, I opened this DCR. DB2 9.7 uses db2fmcd to start DB2 instances. A past DCR was implemented to start db2fmcd from Service Management Facility instead of the depricated inittab (DCR R2PRO00005778). This is only part of the solution. db2fmcd will (attempt to) start db2fmd which will on its turn attempt to start DB2 instances. db2fmd will also try to restart the instances when they fail. The Solaris Service Management Facility replaces this functionality and in addition provides the functionality to stop the services for a foreseen maintenance window and more. So for stopping and starting of DB2 instances we would like to use the standard built-in Solaris Operating System functionality of Service Management Facility instead of the use of db2fmcd and db2fmd. The consequences of not using SMF, they include (but are not limited to) : - Unable to do Solaris Live Update/Live Upgrade procedures: this procedure allows short downtime of the applications as the upgrade of the OS is done on a clone and only during switch of the clone to the real os, the application is down. - Unable to setup High Availability using Solaris Zone Clustering. failover of the Zone Cluster depend on stopping and starting the applications using SMF. As DB2 is not started within SMF, the result will be that the Cluster Manager will receive a timeout (due to required manual stop of db2fmcd process and inittab change) and will not be able to failover which renders DB2 9.7 as an RDBMS software unusable in Solaris 10 Clustered Zone environments. We believe that in order for DB2 to be remain supported on Solaris and still have a future on Solaris, DB2 development should follow the important architectural changes of the Solaris Operating system, including the implementation into the Service Management Facility to allow a proper OS driven stop and start of DB2 instances. Please note that there are other IBM products that are already incorporating SMF like Tivoli Storage Manager please refer to http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27021102 for an example. Dirk Coppieters, IBM Belgium, +32 475 33 81 52, dirk_coppieters@be.ibm.com for customer FODFIN, the Ministery of Finance in Belgium