Bryant Panyarachun

Chief Architect for Ansible for z/OS Ecosystem

3 minute read

The IBM z/OS Provisioning Toolkit V1.1 (z/OS PT) is a command-line utility for UNIX System Services (USS) that leverages the IBM Cloud Provisioning and Management templates to give application developers access to self-service provisioning and deprovisioning of an Information Management System Database Manager/Transaction Manager (IMS DB/TM) system in minutes. The following instructions will help get you set up z/OS PT and use it to provision a new IMS DB/TM instance–historically called IMS Database Manager/Data Communications (DB/DC). 

Download and install z/OS PT

You can download z/OS PT from the z/OS Provisioning Tookit website.  The downloaded zip file contains license information along with a readme and a .pax file. The .pax file contains the z/OS PT runtime binaries. The .pax file needs to be transferred in binary format to the target system where z/OS PT will run. Follow the detailed instructions in the Knowledge Center to complete the installation and configuration of z/OS PT.

Download IMS z/OSMF templates

To download and configure the IMS z/OSMF templates, follow the IMS DB/TM tutorial on GitHub.

Create an IMS template

You need to create an IMS template by using the z/OSMF Cloud Provisioning Software Services. This template will be used by z/OS PT when you build the image. Follow the detailed instructions in the Knowledge Center to create and configure Cloud Provisioning and Management template for z/OS PT.

In this tutorial, we will be using the following values:
Template source file: /u/bpanyar/zospt/workflows/ims/ims.mf
Template name: zosptimsprov
Domain: default
Tenant: default

Create a zosptfile

Before you can build a z/OS PT image, you need to create a file called zosptfile to define the base image and corresponding IMS provisioning template. In this example, you will create a base image (from scratch) with the IMS provisioning template that you created in the previous step (ENV_ZOSMF_TEMPLATE=zosmptimsprov): 

Note: The zosptfile must be encoded in UTF-8.

Build an IMS z/OS PT image

Use the zospt build command to build a new image:

zospt build -t [imageName] [directory path of zosptfile]

In this case, the command gives the z/OS PT image a name of zospt_ims_demo and the zosptfile exists in /u/bpanyar/zospt/samples/ims.

zospt build -t zospt_ims_demo /u/bpanyar/zospt/samples/ims

  1. Verify that the image zospt_ims_demo was successfully built by running the command: zospt images. 

Run the IMS z/OS PT image

Issue the zospt run command to run the newly built image zospt_ims_demo, which will provision a new IMS instance using the zosptimsprov template that you previously created. You should see an output for each workflow step defined in the template (there is also a –draft option on the zospt run command to run the image if the template is in Draft approved state within Cloud Provisioning).

After the provisioning of the IMS instance has completed, a message that the container has been created along with the container name is displayed. 

  1. Issue the zospt ps command to display the currently running containers and verify that the container IMS_DD03 was brought up successfully.
  1. Verify that IMS and IMS Connect is up and running by viewing the syslog. See the IMS CONNECT READY message in the syslog. 

Stopping and starting the z/OS PT container

Use the zospt stop and zospt start commands to start and stop the provisioned instance respectively. Running these commands will invoke the template’s stop and start actions. 

Deprovision the IMS instance

To deprovision the IMS instance and delete the z/OS PT container, issue the command zospt rm IMS_DD03 -f. The completed deprovisioning workflow steps will be displayed and, as a result, all of the allocated data sets and resources will be deleted. 

Summary

In this short tutorial, you should now know how to install and use z/OS PT to provision a new IMS DB/TM system and how to issue various z/OS PT commands to invoke actions on the provisioned IMS instance. 

To find out more information about the IBM z/OS PT or z/OSMF Cloud Provisioning and Management, visit:
Introducing the IBM z/OS Provisioning Toolkit
IBM z/OS Provisioning Toolkit Knowledge Center
IBM Cloud Provisioning and Management

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