Software maintenance strategy for CICS TS and its embedded components

This information helps you plan for updates to CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® (CICS TS) and related software components such as WebSphere® Liberty and CICS Explorer®. Installing APAR fixes (PTFs) using Recommended Service Upgrades (RSUs) as early as possible can help avoid problems that could result in a service call, and as long as you test appropriately, help reduce risks to your business.

Components in CICS TS

CICS TS provides the following embedded runtime components:

Equinox

Equinox is an implementation of the OSGi core framework specification and is provided for both OSGi JVM servers and for Liberty JVM servers. Service for these components is provided when and if required.

Apache Axis2

Axis2 is an open source web services engine from the Apache Software Foundation and is used within CICS to provide the web service Java™ engine for the Axis2 JVM server environment. Service for this component is provided when and if required.

WebSphere Liberty

Liberty fix packs are provided on a regular basis through the CICS TS APAR delivery process and provide an update mechanism to keep the embedded CICS Liberty runtime synchronized with the fix packs provided by WebSphere Application Server. Keeping current helps you resolve problems faster for two reasons:

Liberty APAR fixes (known as ifixes) can only be delivered on the latest Liberty fix pack that has been supplied by the CICS APAR process.
CICS APAR fixes can require other fixes such as WebSphere Liberty fix packs.

CICS Explorer and z/OS Explorer

The IBM® CICS SDK for Java includes components from CICS for developing CICS Java applications. The IBM CICS SDK for Enterprise Java (Liberty) includes Java Enterprise Edition (Enterprise Java) and Liberty API libraries. Service for these components is provided through the CICS Explorer fix pack process when and if required.

Update recommendations

Recommended Service Upgrade (RSU): IBM recommends that you install all RSU PTFs as preventive software maintenance for CICS TS. An RSU is a predefined collection of PTFs identified with a SOURCEID of RSUyymm, where yy indicates the last 2 digits of the year and mm indicates the month. You can order an RSU from Shopz.
Equinox and Apache Axis2: There is unlikely to be much maintenance for Equinox and Axis2. Service for these components is provided when and if required, meaning that it will be on a case by case basis and in most cases this will be to resolve service requests.
WebSphere Liberty: See Table Fixes for WebSphere Application Server Liberty, by release of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS in Upgrading between releases with CICS continuous delivery for a list of APARs that you will need to update CICS TS to the latest version of WebSphere Liberty.
CICS Explorer: IBM recommends that you upgrade to the latest release of CICS Explorer to obtain the most recent functionality and service. Old releases of CICS Explorer are not generally updated with new functions, but new CICS Explorer releases are compatible with all earlier versions of CICS TS. Therefore, CICS Explorer 5.5.36 is compatible with all versions of CICS TS including CICS TS 6.2. For further details, see Latest version of CICS Explorer and CICS Tools plug-ins for CICS Explorer.
Note: Eclipse, z/OS Explorer, and CICS Explorer are packaged as part of the Aqua release train of compatible Eclipse plug-ins, where Aqua refers to IBM Explorer for z/OS Aqua. Depending on the release train, CICS Explorer is referred to as IBM CICS Explorer for Aqua 3.x. It is also possible to install CICS Explorer outside of the Aqua release train, through Eclipse Marketplace. In documentation, these installations are collectively referred to as CICS Explorer.