The CICSPlex SM environment
Before you begin to define your CICSPlex® SM environment, you must understand the components of CICSPlex SM, either because you have to define them or because they can affect the design of your environment.
- What is a CICSplex?
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A CICSplex is any grouping of CICS® systems that you want to manage and manipulate as if they were a single entity. That is, a CICSPlex SM is a management domain, made up of those CICS systems for which you want to establish a single system image (SSI).
- What is a MAS?
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Each CICS region that is managed by CICSPlex SM is called a managed application system (MAS). You define and manage MASs as part of a CICSplex. Every MAS in a CICSplex is managed by a CICSPlex SM address space (CMAS). More than one CMAS can manage the MASs in a CICSplex, but a MAS can connect only to one CMAS at any given time.
- What is a CMAS?
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In every CICSplex, there is one CICSPlex SM address space (CMAS) that is defined as the maintenance point. The maintenance point CMAS is responsible for maintaining the data integrity of the objects in every data repository by synchronizing its data repository with the data repository of other CMASs. It performs this synchronization by using CMAS-to-CMAS links, which are typically used for routing management commands and data between CMASs.
- What is CMCI?
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The CICS management client interface (CMCI) is a system management application programming interface for use by HTTP client applications including IBM® CICS Explorer. You can use this interface to develop HTTP client applications that manage installed and definitional CICS and CICSPlex SM resources in CICS regions in a CICSplex or CICS resources in stand-alone CICS regions.
- What are the tools that you can use to administer CICSPlex SM?
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All CICSPlex SM components, resources, system management requirements, and the relationships between them, are held as objects in a data repository. You can manage these objects using one or more of the provided interfaces:
- CICS Explorer®
CICS Explorer is an Eclipse-based tool that you can use to create, install, and manage the objects in the data repository. It requires a CMCI or SM Data connection to connect to CICS regions.
- The CICSPlex SM Web User Interface
(WUI)
The CICSPlex SM WUI provides a customizable, platform-independent web interface to create, install, and manage the objects in the data repository. With the WUI, you can access CICSPlex SM through standard web browser software to perform operational and administrative tasks such as monitoring and controlling the resources of CICS systems, defining and maintaining the CICSPlex SM configuration, specifying BAS, WLM, RTA, and monitoring requirements, and so on. The web browser client contacts a WUI server by an HTTP request via the CICS Web Interface.
The WUI server is a dedicated CICS region that runs as a CICSPlex SM local MAS and communicates with the managed resources via the CMAS to which it is connected. You can have more than one WUI server active; for example, you might have a requirement for different languages to be used or different systems available to different servers.
Note: The Web User Interface server code must be at the same release level as the CICS region on which it runs and the CMAS to which it is connected.All the menu and view definitions are stored on a server repository. There is one repository for each WUI server. The menu and view definitions can be exported for backup purposes, for distributing definitions to other servers, and for transferring menus and views when upgrading to a new product release.
- The batched repository-update facility
The batched repository-update facility provides a batch job to create CICSPlex SM resource definition objects.
The batched repository-update facility can help you in the migration of your CICS definitions to CICSPlex SM. You can use the EXTRACT command of the CICS CSD update batch utility program DFHCSDUP to read CSD records. CICSPlex SM provides an exit routine EYU9BCSD that generates, from the DFHCSDUP output, equivalent resource definitions for input to the batched repository-update facility.
The batched repository-update facility is also useful for migrating your definitions from one platform to another. You can use it to retrieve existing resource definitions from the CICSPlex SM data repository then, after making any required changes to the definitions, input the changes to another batched repository-update facility run that creates resource definitions on the new platform.
- CICS Explorer®
