Summary
As customers upgrade InterSystems IRIS® for Health and HealthShare® Health Connect, some have encountered a problem related to mirroring HSSYS, which is caused by a simple misconfiguration. This advisory explains how to avoid that problem.
Mirroring of HSSYS is required for InterSystems IRIS for Health or Health Connect.
InterSystems has identified recurring issues during upgrades of InterSystems IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect related to customers not configuring required mirroring for the HSSYS database.
Background
- HSSYS mirroring has been a requirement since the initial release of InterSystems IRIS for Health and Health Connect, but was historically documented only in mirroring guides rather than as an explicit requirement or upgrade prerequisite.
- Customers who attempt upgrades without HSSYS mirroring in place encounter failures in upgrade steps, inconsistencies between primary and backup members, and potential unusable failover states.
- These issues have resulted in production downtime for multiple customers.
Impact
This is a “silent” problem: even if errors appear in the installation or upgrade log files, the system can continue to function. However, these errors indicate underlying inconsistencies that can lead to serious issues during failover or subsequent upgrades.
Customers upgrading without having HSSYS mirrored may encounter:
- Upgrade failures logged in ensinstall.log despite the installation appearing successful.
- Missing roles, resources, and namespace mappings on mirror members that can lead to inconsistent or non-functional failovers. This issue can occur on async mirror members as well as failover (Primary and Backup) mirror members.
- Fatal errors when upgrade steps attempt to use mirrored resources that are required but do not exist.
Required Actions
- All customers must configure HSSYS mirroring for InterSystems IRIS for Health or Health Connect.
- The upgrade target must be version 2024.1 or later of InterSystems IRIS for Health and Health Connect. InterSystems supports upgrades from earlier versions.
Scope
- This advisory applies to all versions of InterSystems IRIS for Health and Health Connect.
- If a customer is migrating an Ensemble deployment to InterSystems IRIS for Health or Health Connect, HSSYS must be mirrored prior to beginning the migration process.
For More Information
For further details about mirroring InterSystems IRIS for Health or HealthShare Health Connect, see the section “ Healthcare Mirroring” in the documentation.
If you have questions or need assistance, please contact the InterSystems
Worldwide Response Center (WRC).