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Building your custom images just got easier and automated with IBM® Wazi Image Builder 1.3.0

By MAHA MASRI posted Fri June 16, 2023 11:34 AM

  

IBM® Wazi Image Builder 1.3.0 is now available

New enhancements have been added to improve the process of building custom images for your IBM Wazi as a Service instances. This blog focuses on two of the recent enhancements, automated system volume discovery tool and the zOS-cloud-prepare tool.  For those of you who want to use the IBM supplied stock image, there is more there too.  Now a z/OS 2.5 based dev and test stock image is available for selection in the IBM Cloud UI.   
 
For custom images, we extract from the on-premises system at the volume level.   This may be too large as we have a 16TB limit on the size of the images so a system admin would need to determine what volumes are needed to have a running system and then include the application data for development and test of the applications needed.  To help with identifying what is needed, we have a tool that will identify the minimum set of volumes needed to IPL a system.  The result is that you have a running custom image system with your settings and more, using critical system data sets, such as the system link list, authorized program facility list, master catalog, and z/OS UNIX System Services file systems.  The discovery process uses IBM Discovery Library Adapter (DLA) combined with Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU) and Discovery programs provided with WIB (feuc).  You can then add inclusion or exclusion lists using data set high level qualifiers to add other data.  In the end, the automated system volume discovery tool helps you build a trimmed down system for your targeted testing.  For more information on how this can be run manually or as part of the Wazi Image Builder tooling, see the blog Identifying which on-premise z/OS disk volumes to extract for IBM Virtual Dev and Test for z/OS, IBM Z Development and Test or Wazi as a Service for manual setup and Creating a volume component if you are using the latest Wazi Image Builder where we have integrated the tool.  Make sure that you update your z/OS Extraction Utilities to take advantage of this update.
 
Wazi Image Builder now also includes a zOS-cloud-prepare tool that helps you define an alternate set of system networking symbols for running in the Cloud environment.  This is documented and is required for custom images because you must have your z/OS networking setup in a specific way in order for the dynamic cloud networking to function properly.  It also allows you to have network settings for IBM Cloud that are independent of the network settings for running on-premises.  
 
We also added the z/OS 2.5 stock image in addition to our usual monthly software stack and service updates, so that now you see a choice of 2.4 or 2.5 for the stock image in the IBM Cloud UI.  This provides the z/OS software stack listed in the stock image and includes Db2, CICS, IMS and lots of other software with everything you may need to have a running system.  For the latest updates of the z/OS stock images, see Change log for z/OS stock images.

Get started today

Use the links below to find out more, and to get started with IBM Wazi Image Builder and IBM Wazi as a Service now!
Creating a z/OS Wazi aaS custom image
Bringing your own image with Wazi Image Builder
z/OS Volume Extraction: How to Identify a Smaller Subset (Critical Set) of Disk Volumes
IBM Wazi as a Service
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