Requirements for Db2 Hosts and Databases

Db2 hosts are servers that have Db2 binaries installed and have Db2 instances created on them. The hosts that contain the data that we wish to ingest are referred to as the source environment. Hosts with empty instances (no dbs in instance) are used as either staging or target hosts. This topic describes the requirements for creating connections between the Delphix Engine and Db2 hosts and instances.

Requirements for Db2 Source Hosts and Instances

Each Db2 Source host (master) must meet these requirements:

IBM Db2 installed and instance created on the machine
HADR settings for each database to be used with the standby server should be preset before the linking process begins as described in Linking a Db2 dSource

Requirements for Db2 Staging and Target Hosts and Instances

The staging environment that the Delphix Engine uses must have access to an existing full backup of the source database on disk to create the first full copy. Delphix recommends using compressed backups as that will reduce storage needs and speed up ingest.
The staging and target Db2 instances that you wish to use must already exist on the host. We can use the same instance for dSource and VDB creation and can also have multiple VDBs on the same instance.
The available instances on each host can be verified by going to the databases tab for the environment in question.
Instance level configuration values such as the buffer pool value will need to be managed by the customer independent of Delphix.
The instances used for staging and target environments must be compatible with the source Db2 instance.

Additional Environment Requirements

There must be an operating system user (delphix_os) with these privileges:

Ability to login to the staging and target environment via SSH
Ability to run mount, umount, mkdir, and rmdir as a super-user. If the staging and target host is an AIX system, permission to run the nfso command as a super-user. See Sudo Privilege Requirements for Db2 Environments for further explanation of the commands and Sudo File Configuration Examples for Db2 Environments for examples of the /etc/sudoers file on different operating systems.

There must be a directory on the staging and target environment where you can install the Delphix Engine Plugin – for example, /var/opt/delphix/toolkit .

The delphix_os user must own the directory.
The directory must have permissions -rwxrwx--- (0770), but you can also use more permissive settings.
If delphix os user and instance users (responsible for the Delphix Engine operations such as linking and provisioning) are not sharing any common group, then Plugin directory must have -rwxrwxrwx (0777) permissions.
The delphix_os user must have read and execute permissions on each directory in the path leading to the Plugin directory. For example, when the Plugin is stored in /var/opt/delphix/toolkit, the permissions on /var, /var/opt, and /var/opt/delphix should allow read and execute for "others," such as -rwxr-xr-x.
The directory should have 1.5GB of available storage: 400MB for the Plugin and 400MB for the set of logs generated by each DB2 instance that runs on the host.
In Db2 Plugin: Plugin directory space will be used as the base location for the mount point.
When multiple engines access the same host environment, create a separate Db2 Plugin directory for each engine that will discover this environment.

The Delphix Engine must be able to initiate an SSH connection to the staging and target environment
NFS client services must be running on the staging and target environment
Staging and Target host instances must have the same Db2 instance code page as the production instance. Instance owner must have a compatible value defined in LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE for the Db2 code page. Preferably derived from the value of LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, or LANG of the instance owner on the production host.

Instance User Requirements

The instance owner of each instance you wish to use within staging or a target host must be added as an environment user within the Delphix engine. See Managing Db2 Users and Instance Owners.
For HADR synced dSources the staging instance owner must be able to "read" the ingested database contents as Delphix will check the validity of the database by querying tables before each dSource snapshot.

Database Container Requirements

All Db2 database containers types are fully supported with the exception of Db2 raw containers. NOTE: If a container is added or deleted, the dSource will have to be resynced.