#Failover

You may have noticed that to configure a mirror for InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect there is a special requirement. I wanted to go through it step by step in this article.

This assumes you have already configured the second failover member and confirmed a successful failover member status in the mirror monitor:

Step 1:Enable HS_Services user (on backup and primary) 

Step 2: Switch to Namespace HSSYS and go to Interoperability > Configure > Credentials. Enter the Password for your predefined HS_Services user (on backup and primary)

We are excited to announce the general availability of JediSoft IRISsync®, our new synchronization and comparison solution built on InterSystems IRIS technology.  IRISsync makes it easy to synchronize and compare IRIS instances.

IRISsync was voted runner-up in the "Most Likely to Use" category at InterSystems READY 2025 Demos and Drinks.

A huge thanks to everyone who supported us — we’re thrilled to see IRISsync resonating with the InterSystems user community!

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with licensing in an HA mirroring environment. We have mirror setup with 2 DB servers (Primary and Backup), and a separate Arbiter using ISCAgent. We currently don't have a license server setup so users using our web app get interruptions and have to log in again if failover occurs. 

It appears to be working correctly, mirroring data etc. but the status on the Primary Cache DB is showing the wrong status for the DR DB.

 re-configured Cache Mirroring BUt  still have the same issue afterwards.

The GUI display remains the same regardless.

From primary Cache portal

 FRom DR Cache PORTAL

Is there any built-in functionality to send out an email or a text message when a mirror member fails?

Hello Everyone,

We currently have CSP application that runs under 2 servers(usually primary), and every month the server reboots for patching SERVER1(primary) in the morning and SERVER2(backup) at night.

Whenever the SERVER1 reboots SERVER2 behaves as primary and when SERVER1 comes back up it will act as backup server.

First Patching:

So, when SERVER1 is down, I need to start httpd service for SERVER2 and stop httpd service for SERVER1 (which is now backup server).

I tried using the code below in terminal to start httpd service for SERVER2 with no success.

In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

We are trying to script a High Availability Shutdown/Start script in case we need to fail over to one of our other servers we can be back up within mins. Is there a way to configure the startup procedure to Automatically Stop/Start the JDBC server when shutting down or starting up cache? is there an auto setting we can change?

Thanks

Scott Roth

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center

I have described my efforts to optimize IRIS Mirror deployment in AWS ElasticContainer Service (ECS) in my prior article.

IRIS Mirror in the cloud (AWS) | InterSystems Developer Community | AWS
 

I have come to the opinion that IRIS Mirror is not as reliable as needed when deployed in ECS. The root of the problem is the fact that ECS randomly assigns one of the available IP addresses to each EC2 host or Fargate task it starts.

These get stored in iris.cpf file in MapMirrors section as shown here:

[MapMirrors.IRISMIRROR]

I have been working on redesigning a Health Connect production which runs on a mirrored instance of Healthshare 2019. We were told to take advantage of containers. We got to work on IRIS 2020.1 and split the database part from the Interoperability part. We had the IRIS mirror running on EC2 instances and used containers to run IRIS interoperability application. Eventually we decided to run the data tier in containers as well. Later we switched from using EC2 instances to Fargate “server-less” compute. A challenge was that each time AWS Elastic Container Service started a new container, it

Hi

I have had customers who would rather use a backup application rather than using IRIS Backups. In my experience, I have tried a number of free backup tools and I have paid for at least two "very good Backup Tools" and all of them have failed to create usable backups especially if my Ensemble/IRIS Instances are still running and even if Ensemble/IRIS have been shut down I have found that the backups created by these tools have around an 80% chance of being able to restore a system (let's assume that I am not trying to backup core Windows elements like the Registry and Windows system files). 

Hi,

I want to know if there is a way to manually change Primary to secondary  and vice versa?

I need this becasue we backup the two VMs (primary and secondary) and my idea is to make a script to when the primary VM is going to backup with Veeam change to "backup" on the mirror.

Thanks!!!

I've created a scheduled task that dumps HL7 messages to flat files. It uses the OutputToLibraryStream() method of EnsLib.HL7.Message. I'd like to be able to run it on a mirror member host whether it's primary or backup.

When run against a database that's mounted read-only, it works fine. However, when I attempt to run it against a mirror backup database, I get the following error:

#5002: Cache error: <PROTECT>%LoadData+7^EnsLib.HL7.Message.1

Tracing that back to the source, I find:

Lock+(^EnsLib.H.MessageD(id)#"SE"):$zu(115,4)

++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

I have Ensemble/Healthshare running in a production environment which is setup with a mirror failover and an arbiter sitting between them.

In the event of a failover we have a number of connections that need stopping/monitoring and starting in a certain order.

Is there a programmatic way we can detect the failover and stop certain services and operations immediately and then start them up again in the required order, checking their connection state before starting the next connection.

I am thinking Ens.Director is probably what I need however I need some guidance on how to implement a solution.