Requirements of managed nodes¶

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 use the CICS collection in conjunction with other IBM z/OS collections, your managed node must also follow the requirements of those collections, for example, IBM z/OS core managed node requirements.

If you use the CICS collection alone but don’t delegate the CICS 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.