High Availability for DB2 on AWS

If you're running an IBM product that requires a DB2 backend, you should really consider running DB2 on AWS. Here's a great article that provides you with the CloudFormation template to set it all up for you very quickly:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/creating-highly-available-ibm-db2-databases-in-aws/

If you're concerned about running your infrastructure in the cloud, please contact us so we can give you the information you need about the tight security and incredible flexibility that AWS provides.

Update 8/8/2023: One important note: this still uses TSAM for failover. What this means is that if your primary DB2 instance has a problem, the entire VM hosting that instance is rebooted. So if you have multiple databases on that instance, they're all failing over to the backup. If you have any other processes running on that VM, they're all going away. You can definitely architect your application to work fine with this, but it is definitely something you have to keep in mind before simply implementing DB2 HADR.

Accessing the CTGINST1 DB2 Instance From the Command Line Processor

When you install IBM Control Desk 7.6 on Windows, you actually have two DB2 instances created - DB2 and CTGINST1. The one with all of the data is CTGINST1, but the one that the system is configured to access is DB2. Luckily, this is easy to fix by changing the environment variable named DB2INSTANCE. After install, it is set to "DB2", and you simply need to change its value to "CTGINST1". You can do this temporarily from the command line or permanently by modifying the environment variables for the user.