Runing Lotus Domino on a mainframe

August 21st, 2008

Sean Burgess suggested that I blogged about running Lotus Domino on z/OS for a development server so here goes:

I am acting as an IT architect for a system called ePOS which acts as a frontend to a payment solution called IBM Payment Systems. This frontend solution is running on Lotus Domino R8 for z/OS - and was upgraded on August 26 from R7 in order to better consume web services on a backend system. The mainframes in question are two IBM z990 (eServer zSeries 990) running z/OS 1.9.

The system setup for the Domino solution is as follows:

  • development server: single Domino server on a single z/OS LPAR
  • combined test and pre-production server: two Domino servers in a cluster on two seperate z/OS LPARs
  • production server: two Domino servers in a cluster on two seperate z/OS LPARs

Please notice that the two mainframes are responsible for all of the 5 LPARs mentioned above.

Teamstudio CIAO! is used for configuration management of the databases on the development server.

The development server is accessible from the intranet only while the test and production servers are accessible from both intranet and internet. The common IBM LDAP (IBM Bluepages) is used for authentication for the intranet systems while a seperate LDAP server is used for the authentication of internet users. The ePOS application accesses backend systems using Java APIs and web services.

I have previously blogged about architectural patterns and Lotus Domino and in this case the architectural pattern used to access Domino from the internet is the "caching proxy and Domino" pattern combined with the high availability caching proxy pattern. This means that the Domino server cluster is located on the intranet while a redundant reverse proxy server (Tivoli Access Manager WebSEAL) is located in the DMZ.

As mentioned I have the role of being the IT architect for the solution running on these servers. I am not responsible for the actual installation of Domino on z/OS but besides doing architecture work I am also involved in the administration of the Domino servers.

Update August 26: The development server has been upgraded from Domino 7.0.2 to Domino 8.0.2.

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