Overview

This course teaches you how to setup, customize, operate, administer, and monitor the IBM MQ Appliance. The course covers initial configuration and setup, administration using the command line interface and web console, security, high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and monitoring, In addition to the instructor-led lectures, the hands-on exercises provide practical experience using a virtual MQ Appliance across the all of the topics.

Audience

Administrators

Prerequisites

Objective

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Complete Initial setup of the appliance
• Create a queue manager
• Connect an application
• Explain the MQ Appliance command line
• Manage User access on administrative interfaces
• Create and manage certificates
• Secure the CLI using certificates
• Secure MQ traffic using certificates
• configure two appliances for HAconfigure two appliances for disaster recoveryconfigure two appliances for HA/DR
• Upgrade an MQ Appliance

Course Outline

Day 1Introductions, agenda review, previous experience and desired outcome

Presentation: Introducing the MQ Appliance.

• Introduce and explain the benefits of the MQ Appliance
• Different models, and the hardware characteristics
• Performance characteristics
• Administrative options

Lab: Introducing the MQ Appliance

• Initial setup of the appliance
• Creating a queue manager
• Connecting an application

Presentation: Explain the firmware and command line interface

• Similarities and differences with the MQ Appliance
• MQ Appliance firmware
• Command line interface
• Scripting the CLI
• Intelligent platform management interface (IPMI)

Lab: MQ Appliance command line

Presentation: MQ Appliance security

• MQ Security
• MQ Appliance Administrative security
• Encrypted disk
• Advanced Message Security (AMS)

Lab: Securing the MQ Appliance

• User access management on administrative interfaces
• Username/password configuration, including LDAP
• Creating and managing certificates
• Securing the CLI using certificates
• Securing MQ traffic using certificates

Day 2Presentation: Introduce High Availability and Disaster RecoveryUnderstanding the key three topologies:

• High availability (2 appliances)
• High availability with single disaster recovery appliance (2 + 1 appliances)
• High availability with resilient disaster recovery site (2 + 2 appliances)

Presentation: Network configuration

• Network devices on the appliance
• Configurations for HA and DR options
• Float IP address
• Link aggregation

Lab: configure two appliances for HA

Lab: configure two appliances for disaster recovery

Lab: configure two appliances for HA/DR

Day 3

Presentation: monitoring a MQ Appliance

• Monitoring the MQ Appliance
• Hardware monitoring
• Failed resources
• Queue Manager monitoring
• Logs
• Log targets

Lab: configuring monitoring of a MQ Appliance

Presentation: MQ firmware and upgrades

• Applying firmware updates
• Backing-up the MQ Appliance
• Restoring the MQ Appliance
• Reset to factory settings
• Considerations for HA & DR

Lab: Upgrading an MQ appliance