Some light reading: CICS DA, SIT parameters, blogging and z/Journal links

A very random collection of CICS links today.

A new tool has just been added to the CICS portfolio. The all shiny and new CICS Deployment Assistant. Congratulations to Grant and everyone else involved on releasing a great new tool!

CICS Deployment Assistant can discover, model, visualize, and deploy new and existing CICS regions, using automation and policy-driven advice built on your own and IBM’s knowledge and experience, giving you access to the latest IBM CICS technology faster and easier than ever before.

Two interesting new APAR (CICS APAR PM15583 and CICSPlex SM APAR PM15214) have also been released for CICS TS V4.1. When applied together, they provide access to the cold-start CICS SIT parameters via the CICSPlex SM API and the CICS Management Client Interface (CMCI). They will allow you to find out not only what value each regions SIT parameters were set to but also where they were set. Very handy for problem determination or just keeping track of your environment.

If you read z/Journal you may have spotted CICSPlex SM developer Dave Williams 3 excellent articles:

• An Implementation Fast Path for CICSPlex SM
• CICS Task History Recording
• CICS Sysplex Optimized Workload Routing

You might notice there are some new sharing options on the blog now as well. At the bottom of every post you should now be able to simply click a button to share the post to twitter or Facebook.

Finally, a new blog focussing on WebSphere and CICS support has also just been created over on developerWorks. I’ve also added the blog to our bookmarks below.

CICS TG plug-in for the CICS Explorer – V2.0 available

The latest release of the CICS TG plug-in for CICS Explorer is now GENERALLY AVAILABLE here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=1083&uid=swg24022354

Version 2.0 can be used to independently view status of multiple Gateway daemons (z/OS or Multiplatforms) and does not require a connection to a CICS TS 4.1 region, or CICSPlex SM, as was the case in version 1.0.

What’s new in version 2.0

• This latest version of the SupportPac provides the following new or revised views:
  • CICS Transaction Gateway Explorer view
  • Gateway daemons view
  • CICS connections view
  • Console view
• Other features are a customizable Resource column layout for Gateway daemons, CICS connections and Property views, and support for CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms.

Note: CS05 V2.0 requires CICS Explorer Version 1.0.0.5, which is available to all existing CICS TS V3 and CICS TS V4 license holders.

Please refer to the link above for further details.

Revitalizing your CICS seminar – Hursley comes to North America

There are two really great CICS seminars coming up at the start of March, if you can get to Boston, Massachusetts (March 2nd) or Palisades, New York (March 4th).

So why are they so great? Well let’s just skip over the fact that they are free full-day seminars for the moment. They are also being taught by the IBM Hursley UK lab team, so you can be sure you are going to be in the hands of the experts (infact I see that CICS Distinguished Engineer Ian Mitchell will be one of the main speakers at the seminar, which is about as good as it gets). The seminar is based around the new CICS TS V4.1 release and won’t just be covering the new functionality in the new release but will also be showing you how to extract real value from your CICS regions.

The seminar is split into 3 sessions:

1. Revitalizing Business
2. Revitalizing Applications
3. Simplifying your IT Environment

This is a seminar that is going to introduce you to what I consider to be the most consumable CICS Transaction Server to date. Part of this is about taking your existing assets and very quickly extracting new value without having to change them. The data inside your CICS regions is now more accessible and readily available than ever before, helping your business to be much more pro-active, flexible and adaptable to new opportunities and challenges that may come your way. To help you get there even faster, the CICS tools are there to help analyze and configure your CICS regions so those opportunities and challenges can be identified with ease.

There is a huge amount of new functionality in CICS TS V4.1, from the CICS Explorer, Event Processing, Atom support, SCA and a whole lot more. If you want to find out how to take advantage, then register for the seminar today so you don’t miss out. These are just the first two dates scheduled, look out for more seminars in April!

Full information on the seminar and registration can be found here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/lmi/cics/index.html

There is also a little more information in the PDF for the seminar here:
2010 Revitalizing your CICS

India CICS Developer Conferences 2009

The first India CICS Developer Conference for 2009, based in Chennai, has just completed. Here we can see Dave Andrews (Director, CICS Products) during the opening keynote:

India CICS Developers Conference 2009 - Chennai

The second conference based in Bangalore, will start on December the 10th. If you hurry, you might still have time to register. (Note that this link will only be available until the end of the week).

Also launched was the India CICS User Group developerworks space. If you want to find out more, go here and get involved.

Dave arrived last week and spent some time before the conference with his TXSeries team in IBM Bangalore. If you want to see part of the team responsible for producing and supporting TXSeries, here you can see them all in an all-hands meeting with Dave:

TXSeries Team in Bangalore

CICS Interdependency Analyzer 3.1

CICS IA 3.1 has been announced today, see here for details.

So what is new in CICS IA 3.1 ?

• CICS TS V4.1 support
• CICS Explorer plugin
• Command Flow
• Natural/Adabas support
• Concurrent Dependency and Affinity data collection
• … and lots more

CICS IA 3.1 is planned to be available on Friday the 4th of September.

CICS Explorer: Security

So you have seen the light and decided to install CICS Explorer? Well done, great decision!

However, depending on your site, this might be easier said than done – not because installing Explorer is hard, but because people will probably start worrying about security now that this easy to use CICS tool is available.

The point of this post is to try explain a little about CICS Explorer and security, so that you can be primed to answer any questions that may arise.

CICSPlex SM Workload Management and Tech Zone Q&A

Impact 2008 is coming to a close tomorrow and I have to say I met some really nice people out here in Vegas and several on twitter.  I ran two presentations on CICSPlex SM workload management (a basics and an advanced session) and both sessions were followed by some good questions I thought I would share the answers to. I’ve also added in some questions from the Tech Zone. Thanks to everyone who attended the presentations!

I have two equal LPARs but CICSPlex SM workload balancing only routes to one of them?

This is a really common question that we get asked a lot. The answer is that CICSPlex SM workload balancing does not actually round-robin the workload across all available target regions. What it does do is try to route to the best available region at all times.  This is commonly the region we routed to last time.  Once that region starts to become heavily loaded CICSPlex SM will begin to route work away into a different region.

Another potential factor here is the utilization of routing regions. CICSPlex SM will always try to route locally if possible, as remote routing goes through slower links. So if you are constantly using the routing regions on LPAR1 you will find that the target regions on LPAR1 are the most frequently used.

Can I associate a routing region with more than one workload?

No. This also means that if you are considering switching to distributed routing from dynamic routing you should be careful that your target regions also do not appear in more than one workload.  When you switch to distributed routing, your target regions need to be able to route as well (i.e. a requesting region). So these new requesting regions can also only be associated with one workload at a time.

Does CICSPlex SM work out the affinities for me?

No. This is a bit of a manual task I’m afraid, although the excellent CICS Interdependency Analyzer is certainly able to help you detect them. The aim over a period of time should be to make sure no new applications are created with affinities without good reason. Work should also be done on the current affinities to see if their lifetime could be reduced or if the affinity could be removed all together.

Is it possible to move a Maintenance Point (MP) CMAS from LPAR1 to LPAR2 if for instance LPAR1 goes down?

Yes, this is possible.  Simply bring the MP CMAS up in LPAR2 without any changes. Note that although it is possible to rename your maintenance point, this is a lot more tricky.

That’s your lot for the moment. If you have other questions you would like to know the answer to then feel free to add them to the new “Ask a question” section available from the top navigation.