How well does WebSphere MQ / Message Broker perform under Linux?

Question

My company is considering moving from Solaris to Linux, but some FUD has been raised concerning how well WebSphere MQ and Message Broker perform on RHEL. There are also concerns about support from IBM. Does anyone have experience using these tools in this environment?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I have had a lot of experience on WMQ and WMB on Linux and even z\Linux both RHEL and SuSE. Both perform very well. The performance papers at IBM are a good place to start, but be aware that the testing in message broker is with small messages and a very simple flow.

From an administrative point of view, they are no different then UNIX.

Answer 2

running our production WMQ V7 environment on RHEL5, was migrated from WMQ V6 running on Solaris... no issues of any kind, and system is up and running 24/7, with a system reboot approx every 6 months for OS patching... it's very reliable and excellent performance.

Answer 3

In addition to what T-Rob says, note that IBM have released specific Hypervisor editions of both MQ and WMB for RHEL. With these you get a full virtualised images including the OS and products pre-installed. That way you get the support for not only the product but with the OS too. See http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/wbimessagebroker/hypervisor/#

Answer 4

There are benchmarks published for both WMQ and WMB on the SupportPacs landing page. The MQ Performance reports are named MP** and the Broker Performance Reports are named IP**. These can give you a rough idea of performance across different platforms.

I have many customers running both WMQ and WMB on Linux in Production. I've worked PMRs for WMQ on many platforms including both Solaris and Linux. Didn't notice any particular difference or bias toward one platform or another from IBM Support.

Also note that that if you go to WMQ v7.1 and Broker 8 you may find the performance on either Linux or Solaris is better than the previous versions on either platform. (WMQ v6.0 goes end-of-life as of September 2012 so hopefully there's a migration planned if you are on v6.0 and you will skip over v7.0 and go straight to v7.1 for the new security features and performance.)

EDIT:
I should have mentioned that WMB v8 is not yet supported with WMQ v7.1 but is expected to be fully supported very soon.

Answer 5

For our dev environment we use the old WMB 6.1 on a small RHEL 5 virtual machine (32 bit, 1 core, 2GB RAM) and it performs very well (up to 15 req/s). I especially appreciate the execution group isolation.