Requirements of managed nodes

The tasks in the IBM® z/OS® CICS® collection can be classified into two types that have different requirements of the managed node.

CMCI tasks

The CMCI tasks in the IBM® z/OS® CICS® collection interact with the managed node over an HTTP connection by leveraging the CMCI REST API. Therefore, an SSH connection is not required. Instead, you can delegate Ansible tasks to run on the control node, for example, by specifying delegate_to: 'localhost' for the task in the playbook. In this case, you install dependencies on your localhost instead of the managed node. For more ways of delegating tasks, see Controlling where tasks run.

The requirements of the managed node are as follows:

• IBM CICS V4.2 or later

• A CMCI connection must be set up in either a CICSplex or a stand-alone CICS region

• Python module dependencies:

  • requests

  • xmltodict

  • typing (For Python versions < 3.5)

  If you delegate the tasks to run on your localhost, the Python module dependencies need to be installed on your localhost instead.

  You can install them from CLI:

  • If your Python version is no less than 3.5:

    pip install requests xmltodict
    

  • If your Python version < 3.5:

    pip install requests xmltodict typing
    

  You can also install them using the playbook. For example, this CICS sample playbook shows how you can ensure the pre-requisites are installed before the module is executed.

If you only use the CMCI tasks in the CICS collection but don’t delegate the CMCI tasks to your localhost, your managed node must also follow the IBM z/OS core managed node requirements except that IBM Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU) is not required.

Provisioning tasks

The provisioning tasks in the IBM® z/OS® CICS® collection interact with a z/OS managed node over SSH and therefore have different requirements to the CMCI tasks. The provisioning modules follow the requirements of the other z/OS collections as documented in IBM z/OS core managed node requirements.

These requirements include an installation of the following components:

• z/OS

• z/OS OpenSSH

• IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python (previously IBM Open Enterprise Python for z/OS)

• IBM Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU)

• The z/OS shell

For specific versions of these dependencies and additional information, review the IBM z/OS core managed node requirements page.