MQ

We have previously talked about MQ Ansible and how it can streamline the deployment process of IBM MQ on your virtual machines (VMs). Check our previous blog and recording here for a refresher on MQ Ansible.

The MQ developer experience team has continued to work on adding new collections and new resources to make sure that your IBM MQ experience is enjoyable, resourceful, and ultimately, the best experience you could have with an MQ product. They are now pleased to introduce a collection that allows you to automate the download and installation of IBM MQ on Windows. 

IBM MQ installation roles for Windows platforms

By Mo Alatoum 

Different from Unix-based platforms, Ansible connects to your Windows hosts using Windows remote management (WinRM). Thus, as a requirement, your target machine must be set up to allow the remote connection. Read on to learn how to set up Ansible:

Pre-requesites

1. Set up your target machine

   Your target host must:

   • Be running either desktop Windows OS 8.1 or later, or server OSs such as Windows Server 2012 or newer.
   • Have PowerShell 3.0 or newer and at least .NET 4.0
   • Have WinRM configured to have a listener created and activated.

   For more information on how to set up your Windows host, please refer to Ansible documentation. You can also run a Configure Remoting for Ansible script to set up your Windows machine and turn on WinRM. For more details of the script, refer to the official Ansible blog here.

2. Set up your local machine

   Your local machine, where Ansible Engine will be executing the playbooks, must run Linux. You must also ensure that your local machine has pywinrm dependencies installed to use WinRM. You can do this by running pip install pywinrm.

3. Set up Inventory file

   To indicate the Ansible Engine to use a WinRM connection, you must configure your ansible_connection host variable to ```winrm``. If you have set up your target machine with self-sigend certificates, you will also need to configure your host var to ignore certificate validtion. An example inventory file:

     [windows]
   
     YOUR_HOSTNAME
   
     [windows:vars]
   
     ansible_user=Administator
   
     ansible_password=YOUR_PASSWORD
   
     ansible_connection=winrm
   
     ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation=ignore

   Note: As installs modify Window's registry, the install can only be performed by the Administrator user.

   • Change YOUR_HOSTNAME to your server/hostname, e.g. myserver-windows.fyre.com
   • Change YOUR_PASSWORD to your target machine Administrator's password.Roles for Windows installation

• downloadmq: For Windows, downloads the IBM MQ Advanced developer package to an specified directory. Default directory in our sample playbook is C:\Users\Administrator.
• installmq: Installs the package.
• setupconsole: Sets up the web console.
• startconsole: Starts the web console.

Implementing the roles on your playbook

Example based in our sample playbook mq-winstall.yml, specifying the directory, version and download URL:

- hosts: windows

  roles:

  - role: downloadmq

    vars:

      directory: C:\Users\Administrator

      version: 930

      downloadURL: "https://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/websphere/messaging/mqadv/"

  - installmq

  - setupconsole

  - startconsole

To run the playbook, issue the following command on your local host:

  ansible-playbook ./mq-winstall.yml -i inventory.ini -e 'ibmMqLicense=yes'

Troubleshooting

If one of the following errors appears during the run of the playbook, run the following commands according to the problem:

• ERROR! A worker was found in a dead state - macOs High Sierra and later versions may get this issue when implementing multithreading scripts.

  Fix:

    export OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES

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For the original content and more information about MQ Ansible, please visit the team's GitHub.
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