IBM MQ installation in Linux

IBM MQ is avail­able for Lin­ux for sev­er­al years and ver­sions. Right now, it is sup­port­ed on Red Hat Enter­prise Lin­ux and com­pat­i­bles (Ora­cle Lin­ux, Cen­tOS, etc.) for Intel x86-64, POWER and z/Enterprise archi­tec­tures, SuSE Lin­ux for the same archi­tec­tures and Ubun­tu Lin­ux on Intel x86-64.

In the fol­low­ing lines, I’ll explain how to install IBM MQ 9.1 (ful­ly licensed ver­sion, not tri­al) on Ubun­tu Lin­ux, using Debian pack­ages and on Red Hat Enter­prise Lin­ux (and CentOS).

Getting the binaries

To get the IBM MQ’s bina­ries, you need access to IBM’s Pass­port Advan­tage Online, the soft­ware dis­tri­b­u­tion web page. This requires a valid soft­ware licens­ing con­tract with IBM.

Access Pass­port Advan­tage Online using the URL:

https://www.ibm.com/software/passportadvantage/

You need to have a valid IBM Pass­port Advan­tage Cus­tomer login to be able to down­load the software.

The files I down­loaded was IBM_MQ_9.1.1_UBUNTU_X86-64.tar.gz and IBM_MQ_9.1.1_LINUX_X86-64.tar.gz. The first file, as it name indi­cates, has Ubun­tu .deb pack­ages, and the sec­ond has RPM pack­ages (for Red Hat, SuSE, Cen­tOS and oth­er Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions that use RPM as its pack­age manager).

Package contents

Both tar files con­tain the same pack­age files, although, of course, as you might know, Ubun­tu uses the Debian pack­age file for­mat and RPM-based dis­tri­b­u­tions (Red Hat, Fedo­ra, SuSE, Cen­tOS, etc.) use the RPM pack­age file format.

Nev­er­the­less, the pack­ages are the same. These are the pack­ages includ­ed in the dis­tri­b­u­tion tar files:

Common installation procedure

What­ev­er the Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tion one is installing MQ on, there are com­mon pre-instal­la­tion steps that need to be taken.

First decom­press the pack­age cor­re­spond­ing to the type of pack­ag­ing you require:

tar zxvf IBM_MQ_9.1.1_UBUNTU_X86-64.tar.gz

or

tar zxvf IBM_MQ_9.1.1_LINUX_X86-64.tar.gz

depend­ing on your Lin­ux distribution.

All the instal­la­tion com­mands hence­forth will have to be run as the root user.

Then, run the mqlicense.sh script:

cd MQServ­er
./mqlicense.sh

Installation on Red Hat and other distributions that use RPM

Instal­la­tion on RPM-based Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions is a sim­ple mat­ter of select­ing the com­po­nents you want to install and, as the root user, run the RPM com­mand spec­i­fy­ing the select­ed com­po­nents, for example:

rpm ‑ivh MQSeriesAMS‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesClient‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesGSKit‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesJava‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesJRE‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesRuntime‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesSamples‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesClient‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesServer‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm
MQSeriesWeb‑9.1.1–0.x86_64.rpm

RPM is smart enough to resolve any depen­den­cy issues and install the pack­ages in the cor­rect order.

Installation on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions

Ubun­tu and oth­er Debian-based dis­tri­b­u­tions use the apt or dpkg util­i­ties for installing soft­ware pack­ages. Con­trary to RPM, dpkg and apt are not capa­ble of resolv­ing depen­den­cies and, there­fore, you have to install pack­ages in the cor­rect order.

To install the same com­po­nents that were spec­i­fied above for RPM-based dis­tri­b­u­tions you issue the command

dpkg ‑i ibmmq-runtime_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-jre_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-java_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-server_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-web_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-ams_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-gskit_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-client_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-man_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-samples_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb
ibmmq-sdk_9.1.1.0_amd64.deb

Post-installation tasks

After installing the desired pack­ages there are a cou­ple of more steps to do before con­sid­er­ing IBM MQ to be installed.

Enter a descrip­tion for this IBM MQ installation.

/opt/mqm/bin/setmqinst ‑i /opt/mqm ‑d “Descrip­tion of MQ
instal­la­tion”

Set this instal­la­tion as the pri­ma­ry instal­la­tion. This step will cre­ate sym­bol­ic links for most of the IBM MQ’s com­mand line util­i­ties in /usr/bin so that it is not nec­es­sary to set your PATH variable.

/opt/mqm/bin/setmqinst ‑p /opt/mqm ‑i

That’s a wrap. You have just installed IBM MQ 9.1.1 on Linux.