A Quick Recap
About a month ago, I blogged about our recent release of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z. As a recap: Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z is part of a platform-wide strategy to support a wide variety of IBM Z use cases across all middleware and solutions. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use platform.
What's New
We are excited to announce a beta release to Ansible Galaxy (v1.1.0-beta1) to enhance the existing IBM z/OS core collection. In this release, we are extending the library of Ansible modules to provide you the ability to automate several operations on z/OS including data access.
These new modules will allow you to execute commands, query and interact with operator messages, move data from z/OS to the Ansible control node, and encode data on z/OS.
The Ansible TSO command module allows you to issue TSO commands to z/OS and receive output returned by that command. There are a wide range of TSO commands that are available on z/OS that are helpful for various automation tasks including making SAF changes or calling REXX execs, just to name a few.
You can also automate your operator queries and responses on your z/OS systems; for example, complete a job execution without the need for manual user intervention. In addition, you will have the ability to manage data across z/OS and off-platform as Ansible control node. You can easily fetch z/OS data from UNIX System Services (USS) and data sets (PS, PDS, PDSE, VSAM ) for off-platform data augmentation and consumption.
And these are just some of the many possibilities to use the new modules. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!
Check out the new modules at IBM z/OS core collection 1.1.0-beta1
- zos_tso_command: Allows a user to issue Time Sharing Option (TSO) commands on the target z/OS system and receives a structured response
- zos_operator: Allows a user to issue operator commands on the target z/OS system and receives a structured response
- zos_operator_action_query: Allows a user to query for all actionable operator messages
- zos_fetch: Provides the ability to fetch data from the target z/OS system back to the local machine (Ansible Control Node)
- zos_encode: Allows a user to encode data recursively in data sets and UNIX System Services (USS)
- zos_ping: Ensures that the target host is reachable and performs checks for basic requirements such as Python on the target z/OS node
Additional Resources