Ansible for IBM Z - Group home

The autumnal equinox is considered the first day of fall, it's one of two moments a year when the sun is above the equator, day and night are roughly equal. For many, this is the time of year they begin their planning, what will you plan to automate? With the IBM z/OS Core version 1.11.0 release, Z Open Automation Utilities and IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python bypassable requisites, you have a winning combination that can automate anything.

IBM z/OS Ansible Core version 1.11.0 has released to Ansible Automation Platform (AAP),  Galaxy and is available in GitHub. This release comes with optional service and support for AAP users and community support for Galaxy and GitHub users. While you are enjoying some seasonal warm beverages, I recommend reviewing the release notes and the changelog for the detailed changes.

This release has enhanced 16 modules with over 30 new features and delivered 5 bug fixes, documentation updates, new examples and sample playbooks.

What's really in the release? 

If you had not seen the blog Oscar Fernandes wrote outlining the beta release, then you are in for a treat. This release focuses primarily on supporting generation data groups (GDG), generation data sets (GDS) with relative name notation, special characters ($ # @) and hyphens in data sets, for example, PROD.DATA#OUT.USER$001. 

You can use Ansible to produce new automation, replace existing automation or augment existing automation. We prefer the better together approach where Ansible integrates with existing automation and is why this release includes support for GDG and GDS operations such as create, delete, copy, read, edit, archive, catalog and uncatalogued. 

There are some modules that were not updated with GDG support only because no use case could be identified but did receive special character enhancements. 

While it is all documented, here is a table overview of which modules received the outlined updates. 

For modules zos_script, zos_job_submit and zos_unarchive, their performance and ability to run in an execution environment was improved by changing the plugins mechanics when interacting with peer modules. Previously, the plugins would perform a thorough mapping of objects through serialization accumulating more than is necessary which could lead to instability, a new architecture has been deployed that reduces these requirements without the need for serialization. 

Absolutely, if there are bugs, the team ensures they address them, in this release several modules had been updated. 

• zos_copy
• Fixes an issue that prevented the module from automatically computing member names when copying a file into a PDS/E.
• Fixes an issue that would perform an unnecessary check if a destination data set were locked for data sets the module created.
• zos_data_set
• Fixes an issue that when checking if a data set is cataloged, did not account for all exceptions. 
• zos_job_submit
• Fixes an issue that under certain Unicode decoding, the error type was generically described. 
• zos_mvs_raw
• Fixes an issue where the first character of each line in dd_output was missing.

- name: Submit JCL from the latest generation data set in a generation data group.
  zos_job_submit:
    src: PROD.SRC.APP(0)
    location: data_set

- name: Submit JCL from a previous generation data set in a generation data group.
  zos_job_submit:
    src: PROD.SRC.APP(-2)
    location: data_set

- name: Copy the rolling log from a GDG to GDG storage.
  zos_copy:
    src: ROLLING.LOG(-199)
    dest: STORAGE.ROLLING.LOG(+1)
    remote_src: true

- name: Archive multiple GDSs into a terse
  zos_archive:
    src:
      - "STORAGE.ROLLING.LOG(0)"
      - "STORAGE.ROLLING.LOG(-1)"
      - "STORAGE.ROLLING.LOG(-2)"
    dest: "STORAGE.ROLLING.LOG.TRS"
    format:
      name: terse
      format_options:
        use_adrdssu: True