Fall 2024 Edition
In September we saw historic levels of flooding and destruction from hurricanes and even unnamed
storms in the coastal areas and western mountains of North Carolina. Here in the central part of the state we just had over 20 inches of rain but a lot less damage. In October it hasn’t rained at all so far.
As a write this there is great anticipation for the 10.2 release of z Workload Scheduler and a 10.2.3 release of the distributed Workload Automation product. The 9.5 release has less than a year of support remaining (get your support extension requests done if you think you may still be on the 9.5 release after September 30, 2025). If you haven’t ordered the 10.1 release of zWS from Shop Zseries you should do this while it is still available. It will not be possible to order a CBPDO of 10.1 once 10.2 becomes available, probably in mid-to-late December 2024.
To find out more about what’s new in 10.2 and beyond, plan on attending an ASAP Techtalk presentation on Wednesday October 30 at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Time (GMT-4). The US does not go back to standard time until November 3.
If you have a few weeks before going into an end-of-calendar-year freeze period, take a look at the HIPERs listed below and other “routine” maintenance. Even if your production environment is frozen it may be a good time to get a test installation of 10.1 or 10.2, if you don’t already have one.
There isn’t a lot to report right now. The next edition in January will have updates on the new releases.
Flashes
If you don’t receive notification for flashes, check your settings at www.ibm.com/support/mynotifications
No new FLASHes since April 2024.
Hipers
These are the new HIPERs since July 2024:
PH62151 CONTROLLER ABEND 878-10 LISTING THE JOBLIB’S MEMBER FROM THE DWC
9.5 UI97891
10.1 UI97892
PH61945 ABEND 0C4 ON SERVER WHEN RUNNING A WHAT-IF BY DWC
9.5 UI97799
10.1 UI97800
PH61697 CONTROLLER TASK COULD HUNG DURING THE SHUT DOWN IF SSL IS USED
9.5 UI97408
10.1 UI97409
PH62333 ABEND 0C4 IN DATASTORE (IN EQQFSTWR)
9.5 UI98500
10.1 UI98501
PH59155 LPAR COULD CRASHED IF THE CONTROLLER ASID WAS CANCELLED AND IT WAS PREVIOUSLY STARTED WITH REBUILD
9.5 UI96747
10.1 UI96748
If you have fallen a year or more behind on HIPER maintenance (not a good idea of course) be sure to put on this one, as recovery from a z/OS crash could be very difficult otherwise:
PH53158 A SUDDEN SYSTEM IPL MAY CAUSE THE CURRENT JT TO CLOSE INCORRECTLY
9.5 UI92055 and UI92056
10.1 UI92057 and UI92058
Technotes
Revised technote:
ZWSTECHNOTE : DWCZOS : Creating / Installing the certificates for DWC 10.2.1 or higher on z/OS
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7154608
New technote:
ZWSTECHNOTE: Messages EQQHT03E and/or EQQPH62E may indicate that a HOME directory with WRITE ACCESS is required
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7171700
Ideas (formerly RFE)
Z Workload Scheduler:
support us to allow only one session for one user at a time through DWC. [ZWS-I-254]
CDPz messaging modification to support data consumption by monitoring products. [ZWS-I-255]
Additional time options for Not Started Alert/Action at operation level [ZWS-I-256]
Create an option for manual control of job late starts for email alerts. [ZWS-I-257]
Issue alert/warning message when PS (parallel servers) reaches limit [ZWS-I-258]
Alert message when a WS has reached the max of parallels servers coded [ZWS-I-259]
Grouping feature to group the jobs for more granular anomaly detection in AIDA [ZWS-I-260]
Allow WAPL to be able to update database example UPDSR by ADID and Jobn [ZWS-I-261]
WAPL: Create same ability of CLDATE to select specific days of the week for PRDATE [ZWS-I-263]
In addition to open idea ZWS-I-230 besides removing the TEMPORARY operand of parameter SSCMNAME, it would be better to remove parameters BUILDSSX and SSCMNAME and just use SETSSI commands [ZWS-I-264]
Rearrange ACTUAL START field from panel EQQSOP2L to panel EQQSOP1L [ZWS-I-266]
Support for 27 x 132 screen size in Workload Scheduler [ZWS-I-268]
Add DWC userid (in addition to RACF userid) to EQQPH72I message [ZWS-I-269]
Workload Automation:
I selected a few that may be of interest to zWS customers:
We are requesting that the DWC time field support the more conventional 12:00 – 12:59 AM/PM and/or 24 hour clock value. [WAO-I-532]
Ability to customize the version 10.1 Workload Designer. [WAO-I-543]
Add operator instruction for jobs and jobstreams as Z workload Scheduler [WAO-I-544]
way to have TWSINST not start the Agent after it finishes [WAO-I-547]
Multi factor Authentication [WAO-I-552]
How to set a password for the KeyStores and TrustStores when deploying IWA with Kubernetes/Helm Charts. [WAO-I-557]
BLOGs
You can see all the BLOGS related to workload automation (distributed workload scheduler, DWC and zWS) at http://www.workloadautomation-community.com/blogs
New BLOGs:
HCL Automation Orchestrator Suite: A Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms.
Synchronize and Control: The Power of the Sleep Plugin
AI at Your Fingertips: The IBM WatsonX Plugin for Workload Automation
Wrap Up
Have a great holiday season! Looking forward to new beginning and new releases.
Maybe this year we will get some snow here.
Steve
