This post is part of a series exploring the unique aspects and capabilities of WebSphere Liberty when running on z/OS.
We'll also explore considerations when moving from WebSphere traditional on z/OS to Liberty on z/OS.

To start at the beginning, follow this link to the first post.

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Product registration is another thing we’ve talked about previously in this space.  Just to remind you, at startup Liberty will use a z/OS API called IFAUSAGE to register its presence with z/OS.  That information will turn up in SMF 89 records that feed into the SCRT tool which generates reports to send to IBM about what products you’re using and how much (in MSUs) you’re using them. 

Liberty can register as itself if you’ve purchased it and are running your own applications inside it.  It can also register, instead, as some other IBM product that has a copy of Liberty inside of it.  CICS and z/OS Connect are examples.  There’s also a copy of Liberty included in z/OS that some other IBM products exploit, such as z/OSMF.  In both cases those products will provide information to Liberty that we’ll use to register with z/OS INSTEAD of registering as WebSphere.  If you just start a server using the Liberty embedded in z/OS on your own (not as part of some IBM product) then it will register as yet a different name.  I’m not going to get into the terms and conditions of such use…see the earlier blog posts. 

So what about messages?  Well, for every product we register as you’ll see a CWWKB0108I message giving you the name and version of the product.  If this is just WebSphere that you bought it should be “WAS FOR Z/OS” (yeah, all caps) and something like 24.0.0.12 or whatever level you have.  If it is some other embedding product you should see their name.  If it is just the z/OS embedded copy the product name is something like “Liberty Dev Use”.  If you see the message with that “Dev Use” string and it is running as part of some IBM product, you should complain to them that they aren’t setting things up properly to register as the IBM product and not as Liberty. 

It is possible you might have a single Liberty server registering for more than one product.  If that’s the case you’ll get a CWWKB0108I for each product.  You’ll also see CWWKB0112I  or CWWKB0113I to let you know the total count of products we registered for.  Why two different messages?  Well, it has to do with product Deregistration. 

z/OS won’t allow code running unauthorized call IFAUSAGE to deregister a product as running in an address space.  That means a Liberty server needs access to an Angel and the PRODREG service to deregister (we also need to be authorized to register more than two products running in one address space, but that probably doesn’t come up much).  If we can leverage an Angel and do our deregistrations ourselves, you get the 112I message which indicates we’ll deregister on server termination.  But if we don’t have access to an Angel then we have to rely on address space termination and z/OS cleanup of it to do the deregistration for us.  If that’s the case then you’ll get the 113I message instead to let you know how registration cleanup occurs.