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The great Windows or Linux debate for DB2 LUW

04 May,2016 by Tom Collins

I manage large DB2 servers on Windows and Linux , so I’m confident both OS platforms can support installations with large data sets and high end throughput. But believing DB2 will perform exactly the same on both Windows and Linux  without some analysis is a recipe for problems.    There  are some considerations when planning switching or deciding between DB2 or Linux or Windows.

  1. Scriptability of DB2 on Linux versus Windows. If migrating from Linux – you may have a large shell script library which manage Linux and commit the flow control . There may be considerable work to adapt these scripts into a Windows supporting scripting language There are platform agnostic tactics – such as Perl DBI .On Windows you can use CMD (fairly limited), VBScript and Powershell. There is also the more exotic possibility of CLPPlus.

         Powershell has lots of cmdlets and is very powerful on the Windows platform. I use it for managing DB2 on Linux but only as a method to trigger and gather data from Linux servers. For example DB2 – How to pscp from the command line

         2.Historically DB2 on the Windows 32 bit was a headache – a fair degree of Windows trickery was required to extract. Since Windows 64 bit – life has become a lot easier for the DBA managing DB2 on Windows.

          3. Weigh up the full Total Cost of Ownership :

             - Backups  - Does the Enterprise backup platform support DB2 the same across both OS platforms? If you happen to be using TSM , than it's very well integrated into DB2 .

             - Monitoring

             - Active Directory Integration - There are plug ins on Linux but I've found AD and ADSI are easier to implement in Windows

            - Scheduling – Cron versus Winnows Scheduler versus other scheduler such as Autosys

            - Alerting via email or pagers

             - Different tuning configurables on Windows versus Linux . Linux and Windows are different OS software platforms. They both have specific configuration tuning considerations. Good quality Linux or Windows Administrators can assist greatly in architecting a reliable platform

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Posted by Tom Collins at 5:06 AM in Linux, Tuning | Permalink | Comments (3)

I would say, add an extra bullit:
4) High Availibility and Disaster Recovery
Although quite good, since Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows2008, Microsoft's "Failover Cluster" is actually the ONLY option for high availability; ALternative DB2's HADR is practically out of the question when running DB2 on Windows (Windows lacks proper / robust, TSM for failover; and worse: on Windows 2012 it will not work at all: DB2's HADR requires "TSAMP", on Windows "TSAMP" requires Microsoft's "SUA" (for ported POSIX unic), and that's out of support / depricated starting Windows 2012)

Posted by: Erwin Hattingh | May 4, 2016 6:42:40 AM

Erwin, I've found the DR \ HA for DB2 LUW is much more solid and supportable on Linux. Combination of Linux, TSAMP,DB2 LUW is excellent , particularly since DB2 10.1

Posted by: Jack Vamvas | Jun 1, 2016 4:58:48 AM

A comment for the DB2 HADR on Windows discussion.
I've tried deploying TSAMP via SUA on Windows 2008 R2. It actually worked! For about a week and a half each time... After that period of time some kind of timing issue between Windows and SUA was causing TSAMP to go half-mad and migrate resources without rhyme or reason. We reported that to IBM, who blamed Microsoft, who turned around and said "Too bad. Anyway, we are discontinuing SUA anyway."

However, I just completed a project to automate DB2 HADR via MS Failover Clustering under Windows 2012 R2. It is using a combination of a VBS wrapper and a PowerShell script. VBS (or JSCript) wrapper is required because this method is using MSFC's "Generic Script Resource", which, unfortunately, works with WSH-based scripting languages only, so one cannot use PowerShell directly. This is odd since WSH hasn't been updated in years, and looks to have been completely abandoned by Microsoft in favor of PowerShell, but I digress...
Anyway, my scripting solution can do a graceful takeover as well as an automated failover in case of primary node reboot, or primary instance crash. It will reintegrate on takeover, and attempt to reintegrate after a reboot; however, MSFC seems to lack the necessary wits to attempt to restart services on now-standby-formerly-primary node after it transfers resources to new primary, so a manual intervention is necessary to restart HADR and attempt to reintegrate. Anyway, at that point someone should probably be looking at why DB2 crashed, no?

Posted by: Luke Numrych | Dec 11, 2017 11:13:17 AM

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