Requirements of managed nodes¶

The tasks in the IBM® z/OS® CICS® collection can be classified into two types, CMCI tasks and provisioning tasks, 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:

z/OS Version 2.3 or later
All IBM CICS TS releases that are in service
A CMCI connection must be set up in either a CICSplex or a stand-alone CICS region
Python module dependencies:
- requests
- xmltodict
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 the CLI by using the following command:
```
pip install requests xmltodict
```
You can also install them using the playbook. For example, this CICS sample playbook shows how you can ensure that the prerequisites are installed before the module is executed.

If you 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 installation of the following components:

z/OS Version 2.3 or later
z/OS OpenSSH
IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python (previously IBM Open Enterprise Python for z/OS)
IBM Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU) 1.2.x
The z/OS shell

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

Note that you must have z/OS core collection 1.5.0 or later installed in the control node if you want to run the provisioning tasks.