IBM Copy Services Manager Session automation

IBM Copy Services Manager offers a Command Line Interface (CSMCLI) which can be used for automated Session management. The CSMCLI becomes useful, if you need to integrate CSM session actions into higher-level automation routines or batch environments, for example to create a Practice Copy at a certain time.

Apart from running individual (or a series of) scripted CSMCLI commands, starting with CSM 6.2.1 there is a new Scheduled Task capability that can also be used to accomplish a certain degree of session automation.

Starting with CSM 6.2.9, a Restful API interface is also officially supported to use http methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) for sending requests to the CSM server. The Rest API can be used by any web service tool or program language from any server platform to monitor and automate CSM server or session management.

This white paper discusses usage and best practices for the mentioned session automation options. The scripting part focuses on CSMCLI scripting options on z/OS, since the CSMCLI runs in z/OS Unix System Services and automated execution of USS Shell commands might not be commonly known for mainframe system programmers or storage administrators. Therefore, the used script language in this paper focuses on Rexx, which is available on z/OS platforms and can easily be integrated into batch environments.

However, Rexx is not only available on z/OS, but can also be used on other platforms by leveraging commonly available, portable Rexx interpreters, for example:

• Regina Rexx (  https://regina-rexx.sourceforge.io/ )
• Brexx (  https://sourceforge.net/projects/brexx/ )

The CSM Scheduled Tasks part focuses on task capabilities introduced since CSM 6.2.2. They allow any session management action to be added to a scheduled task while a task can also support multiple actions against multiple sessions.

The CSM Rest API interface is also introduced and a Rexx Framework leveraging the CSM Rest API via z/OS Web Enablement Toolkit services is also described.

Throughout this paper, a concrete example scenario is used to discuss CSM session automation capabilities with a Rexx script and Scheduled Tasks. This example scenario leverages a DS8000 4-site replication topology and creates a consistent copy of data on the fourth site for testing purposes while restarting the Global Mirror replication afterwards.