Processing change packages
When you have made all the changes that you want to a change package, you can then process the change package. The package must be made ready before the package can be processed, and the resources migrated.
Marking a change package as ready
When you have finished adding resource definitions to the change package, and finished editing those resource definitions, you can mark a change package as ready. Now you must also select a migration scheme for the change package.
Procedure
- Right-click the change package in the Change Packages view, and click Ready > Select Migration Scheme. The Change Package window opens.
- Click the migration scheme that you want to use for the change package, and click Next.
- Choose whether you want to process the action now, or whether you want to create the JCL and run it later. Click Finish.
Results
If you chose to process the action now, the change package is processed and marked as ready. If you chose to create the JCL, then the change package is marked as ready when the JCL is submitted.
When you mark a change package as ready, CICS® Configuration Manager calculates and stores checksums of the candidates. Later, when you migrate the change package, CICS Configuration Manager calculates new checksums and compares them with the stored values. If any of the checksums are different, it means that the candidates have changed, and CICS Configuration Manager does not allow the migration. This check protects you from migrating unexpected changes.
Marking a change package as unready
If a change package is marked as ready, but you want to postpone its approval or migration, you mark the change package as "unready". Later, when you want to approve or migrate the change package, you mark it as ready again. If any approver roles have approved the change package before it was marked as unready, then, when you mark the change package as ready again, these approvals are removed, even if none of the resource definitions in the change package have changed since it was first marked as ready.
Procedure
- Right-click the change package in the Change Packages view, and click Unready. The Change Package window opens.
- Click the migration scheme that you want to use for the change package, and click Next.
- Choose whether you want to process the action now, or whether you want to create the JCL and run it later. Click Finish.
Results
If you chose to process the action now, the change package is processed and marked as unready. If you chose to create the JCL, then the change package is marked as ready when the JCL is submitted.
Migrating a change package
If a change package is marked as ready, you can process the package and migrate the resources.
Procedure
- Right-click the change package in the Change Packages view, and click Migrate. The Change Package window opens.
- Click the migration scheme that you want to use for the change package, and click Next.
- Choose whether you want to process the action now, or whether you want to create the JCL and run it later. Click Finish.
Results
If you chose to process the action now, the change package is processed and the resources are migrated. If you chose to create the JCL, then the resources are migrated when the JCL is submitted.
- Confirms that the change package is still ready. That is, the package has not changed since you marked it as ready, and is not been marked as unready.
- If approval is required: confirms that the change package is fully approved.
- Reads the candidate resource definitions from the source CICS configurations, and transforms them according to the rules specified by the migration scheme.
- Writes the transformed candidates to the target CICS configurations, and writes before and after images of these migrated resource definitions to the journal (so that you can back out the migration later).
- Adds the migrated resource definitions to the change package. This step means that you can reuse the change package with different migration schemes to progressively migrate resource definitions between environments.
Backing out a migration
You can use the backout action to undo a migration.
Procedure
- Right-click the change package in the Change Packages view, and click Backout. The Change Package window opens.
- Click the migration scheme that you used for the change package, and click Next.
- Select the migration event that you want to undo and click Next.
- Choose whether you want to process the action now, or whether you want to create the JCL and run it later. Click Finish.
Results
If you chose to process the action now, the change package is processed and the migration is backed out. If you chose to create the JCL, then the migration is backed out when the JCL is submitted.