CICS TS 4.1 WLM performance demo
If you have any interest in CICSPlex SM Workload Management (WLM) on CICS you should go check out this new YouTube video now! I’ll leave the video description itself to explain the contents.
This nine minute demo by Dave Williams of CICS Development in Hursley, UK demonstrates some of the performance improvements made in CICS TS V4.1 when using the new Sysplex Optimized WLM function. Throughputs for similar workloads are compared between CICS TS V3.2 and CICS TS V4.1 with Sysplex Optimized WLM switched on and off.
Just to give a little extra background, Dave was the chief developer and does an excellent job here of clearly describing the new improvements.
A slight confession, I wrote the tool the video uses to analyse and chart the workloads. It is an internal IBM test tool, so you can’t get your hands on it, but if you would like to know more or you think it would be useful to you, let me know.
If you are interested in seeing more videos like this, direct from the development team, add a comment, with maybe a sentence or two about what you would like to hear about.
Notes
- For more details on Sysplex Optimized WLM see here.
- Dave used the term ‘Base table’ in the clip. A ‘Base Table’ is more commonly known as a Resource Table. The new table Dave referred to is WLMATARG.
- The tests performed here show an artificial workload running 10,000 transactions using the Distributed Routing mechanism. The results you achieve with your workloads in your environments may differ.
Tip on deleting content from an information center
I recently had a query from a colleague about updating his locally installed information center. He had updated it to include more recent versions of documentation and deleted the old JAR files and directories. However, the information center was corrupted when it restarted. So why does this happen and how do you fix it?
When you start an information center, Eclipse caches the navigation and when you search it creates indexes and stores these for future use. This helps with performance, particularly in a large information center like CICS. When you add new content, these caches are updated automatically for you to add new navigation entries and search indexes. However, if you delete content, the caches are not updated which can lead to unexpected results or the “corruption” experienced by my colleague.
To fix the problem:
1) Shut down your information center using the help_end.bat file
2) Delete the ibm_help\eclispe\workspace directory
3) Delete the directories in the ibm_help\eclipse\configuration directory but not the config.ini file.
4) Restart the information center using the help_start.bat fle
When Eclipse restarts, it creates a new cache for the navigation and will recreate the search indexes on your first search.
New infocenter downloads available for z/OS
We have just published two new downloads on the IBM Publications Center for the CICS TS 4.1 and 3.2 information centers. These downloads run the infocenter on z/OS for the relevant release and contain the latest CICS TS, CICS TG, and tooling information. Both use the latest Eclipse code, which fixes the problems with viewing PDFs.
If you’re interested, the number for the CICS TS 3.2 infocenter on z/OS is SK4T-2656-00. The number for the CICS TS 4.1 infocenter on z/OS is SK4T-2654-00. The download is a zip file which contains a readme and a JAR file. The installation is much simpler – the JAR file contains the configured infocenter. You still need to edit the start script to point to your Java installation and provide a port number. Other than that though, you don’t need to do any other configuration (no copying plug-ins etc). The prereq is Java 6.
New Redbook on the uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies
If you’re interested in the new features of CICS TS V4.1, and are looking for examples of their use in real life scenarios, then you might be interested in a new Redbook we’re writing in sunny Montpellier. Its title is “Smarter Banking with CICS” (probably). While it is aimed primarily at the banking industry, it will include example uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies with CICS to show how these could be used within an existing CICS system. Watch this space for more information (or follow its progress on Twitter).
To whet your appetite, here’s what will probably be the preface:
It goes without saying that 2009 was a year of unprecedented change in global banking. The challenges that financial institutions are facing require them to cut costs, but also to regain trust and improve the service that they provide to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding set of customers.
In the past, siloed and rigid IT systems have often inhibited banks in their attempts to re-engineer their business processes. IBM’s Smarter Banking initiative highlights how more intelligent software can be used to significantly improve the end-to-end integration of banking processes.
This IBM Redbook aims to show how software technologies like SOA, Web 2.0 and event driven architectures, can be used to implement Smarter Banking solutions. Our focus is on CICS Transaction Server which is at the heart of most bank’s corebanking implementations.
The first part of the Redbook is aimed at business leaders, it introduces Smarter Banking, provides an overview the IBM Banking Industry Framework, and then illustrates the value proposition with a set of Smarter Banking business scenarios.
In the second part of the book we address the bank’s technical leaders by providing an overview of the key technologies and describing how CICS supports these technologies today.
IBM’s SmartBank showcase is used in the final part of the book to illustrate how we enabled business event processing and Web 2.0 technologies in the SmartBank environment, in a non-invasive way without changes to the applications.
- We show how we enabled the CICS corebanking system to emit events for large transactions. We also show how these events are consumed by WebSphere Business Events which is configured to take a pre-defined action when a certain pattern of events occurs.
- We also show how the CICS corebanking data, such as account transaction information, can be exposed as a mashable Web 2.0 feed so that the account holder has instant access to the recent transaction history.
It is hoped that this IBM Redbook will help you to take the first steps toward Smarter Banking with 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
GSE UK conference – let’s chat!
This Wednesday, sees the start of the Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK conference and I’m going to be there along with quite a few other IBM Hursley employees from the CICS team. Assuming there is reasonable internet at the venue, I’m hoping to take some time to blog about the event while I’m there. I’m hoping to get chatting with a quite a few of you as well while I am there so if you want to meet-up for a chat, please get in touch via the blog or on twitter (@chrishodgins), I’ll try to check both as much as I can during the conference. Other than that I should be lurking around at most of the CICS presentations.
The conference has a nice varied agenda covering 9 different streams so there should be lots to take in! The streams are:
- CICS
- IMS
- DB2
- Enterprise Security
- MQ
- Large Systems Working Group
- Network Management Working Group
- Software Asset Management
- New Technologies
I only managed to convince one other sucker colleague from the CICS team to join me for a mugshot on the blog to make it easier to track us down. So without further ado, keep your eyes peeled for one lanky Scotsman (that’s me – left) and Kevin Bowkett (on the right).
Chris Hodgins
Kevin Bowkett
Kevin is a first line manager for CICS with responsibility for Web Services, SCA, Web 2.0 and Java. He has the pleasure of taking the first CICS presentation on Wednesday morning, which is the CICS TS 4.1 overview. This is definitely one to catch so you have a nice grounding for the rest of the CICS presentations over the 2 days.
On the Thursday afternoon, I’ll be presenting on CICS Explorer aka “The new face of CICS”. So please feel free to grab me at any time or after the presentation to have a chat about it. I’m primarily a CICSPlex SM developer and lately one of the main developers on the CICS Management Client Interface. So if you need to get your head around any of that lot you know where I am. I’m happy to talk about anything else CICS related as well.
Both Kevin and myself will be about on Wednesday and Thursday. So see you there!
| CICS | IMS | DB2 | Enterprise Security | MQ | Large Systems Working Group | Network Management Working Group | Software Asset Management | New Technologies |
UK Student Mainframe contest
If you are reading this blog you are probably working somewhere that uses IBM mainframes and may be interested in helping to ensure that university students have had a taste of the mainframe (or -sorry Chris – proper computing as I call it).
So if you or your organisation has relationships with UK universities, then please make sure that they are aware of the upcoming UK Student Mainframe Contest. This is a really good way for UK university students to learn about System z.
If students participate and they get through the early challenges they will get their mitts on CICS and other z/OS software… Though the chance of winning a Sony Playstation 3 might be more of an incentive than getting first hand use of CICS 
.
CICS Explorer Security – Basic Authentication
If you are using a CICS Management Interface (CMCI) connection with CICS Explorer and are getting security problems due to the the wrong userid – typically the CICS default user – is getting used for the checks, the likely cause of the problem is that the TCPIPSERVICE you have set up is not defined appropriately.
CICSPlex SM Web User Interface users, should not have this problem as the TCPIPSERVICE used for CMCI users is automatically created with settings appropriate for the environment, but if you are an SMSS (‘single server’) user, and have configured your own TCPIPSERVICE, perhaps using the IBM supplied group (DFH£WU) as a model, then if the CICS is running with SEC=YES, then you need to update the TCPIPSERVICE used by the CMCI so that it specifies Authenticate(Basic):
If you do NOT run with Basic authentication on the TCPIPSERVICE used by the CMCI, your userid/password credentials will not be checked by CICS and the requests that are run in the CICS via the CMCI / CICS Explorer will be associated with the CICS default user.
CICS Explorer on Mac OS X
Shhh …now please keep this to yourself as I don’t really want to admit it ….
I am about to out myself here, but I like to use Mac OS X.
There I said it. But please don’t hold it against me!
I also like to use CICS Explorer, so that means I have a dilemma… Because, officially, the supported CICS Explorer platforms are:
- Microsoft Windows Vista
- Microsoft Windows XP (32-bit)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32-bit)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux V5 (Intel®) (32-bit)
Mac OS X is missing from that list!
If you are prepared to run with an unsupported environment for CICS Explorer, it is possible to get CICS Explorer running on Mac OS X. That is the aim of this post.
CICS Explorer & CMCI/CICSPlex SM API support for CSD resources
CICS TS 4.1 APAR PK90112 closed last week. This APAR extends the CICSPlex SM API to provide access to CICS CSD resources.
Because the CICSPlex SM API model is used for the CMCI, and the SMSS (Single Server), this means that if you are a CICS TS 4.1 user, then once you have installed the PTFs for PK90112 (UK50340,UK50319,UK50341) and upgraded CICS Explorer to 1.0.0.2, you will be able to work with definitions in the CSD. This will work if you are using CICSPlex SM or the SMSS capabilities of the CMCI.
How does it work?
In the ‘CICSplex Repositories’ tab within CICS Explorer, if you have a CICSplex selected, then the CICS resources selected from the Administration menu will show CICSPlex SM BAS resources, for example:
BAS definition
To work with a CSD resource, you need to select a CICS from the ‘CICSplex Repositories’ tab:
CSD definition
Check out the “What’s new in version 1.0.0.2″ within CICS Explorer for more details, and for details on the CMCI / CICSPlex SM API changes, see the DOC ++HOLD on the PTFs.
If you have any questions about the CSD support in CICS Explorer, please fire away over on Developerworks. If you have questions are on using the CMCI or CICSPlex SM API with the CSD support, feel free to ask away here…
Note that this CSD support is only available for CICS TS 4.1 systems, it is not available for earlier releases, even if they are managed by CICSPlex SM 4.1.
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