Get to know OCLI! Five interesting facts and getting started.

​On this post we will go through the new orchestration command line interface available for both IBM and HCL Workload automation as well as for the new Universal Orchestrator.
We will also cover the basics to start running the very first ocli plan command.

​Below are five important facts about OCLI:

1. OCLI aims to be the “replacement” of conman and composer, written in golang it comes as single binary executable, which means no runtime interpreter is needed nor additional runtime for its execution.
2. OCLI comes within the Dynamic agent install, but one major advantage is that you can download a Windows / MacOS / Linux executable and access MDM from your personal workstation. No more accessing the MDM via ssh.
3. Currently it supports over 23 plan commands, and support for scheduling objects CRUD is coming on the next release “composer like”.
4. OCLI context allow us to quickly switch between MDMs. For example I can run a show CPU on two MDMs by just running “ocli plan sc ; ocli context switch mdmprod ; ocli plan sc”.
5. OCLI model will introduce a new way to manipulate scheduling objects. No more multiple files as now I can have different scheduling objects on the same file to be added on the database. OCLI is also capable to manage dependencies that was not yet added on the database as well as a much faster time to replace / add / remove objects.

To start ocli, we need to download the executable from either IBM Passport advantage or HCL’s flexera. (according to the table below).
For IBM (Passport advantage)
M0GPLML IBM Workload Scheduler 10.2.1 OCLI for MAC x86 Multilingual
M0GPKML IBM Workload Scheduler 10.2.1 OCLI for MAC ARM Multilingual
M0GPGML IBM Workload Scheduler 10.2.1 OCLI for Windows on x86-64 Multilingual
M0GP3ML IBM Workload Scheduler 10.2.1 OCLI for Linux on x86-64 Multilingual
 
For HCL (Flexera)
HWA_10.2.1_OCLI_LINUX_X86_64.zip
HWA_10.2.1_OCLI_MAC_ARM_64.zip
HWA_10.2.1_OCLI_MAC_X86_64.zip
HWA_10.2.1_OCLI_WINDOWS_X86_64.zip

Table 1 ocli download information
Extract the zip file, open command prompt / PowerShell and run “.\ocli.exe plan”. The command will create a config.yaml file on the user’s home directory C:\Users\username\.OCLI .
Table 2 shows a sample file of the settings needed to configure ocli. Let’s focus on the important one:

​name: change default to a more meaningful name so you are able to identify the environment.
default_env: same as name but can also be changed by running “ocli context switch <env name>”
host: That’s the IP from the Master Domain manager
Port: the port from Openliberty / Websphere liberty https port. Default is 31116.
jwt: the Jwt token. You can create one via DWC landing page, clicking on the right upper corner user icon, “Manage API Keys” > “Select the same engine/MDM as you have from the hosts” > Add New button > Give a name and Submit. You will be presented with a token, save before closing as you will not able to retrieve again.
insecure: true (by default is false, but as many MDMs uses self-signed certificates you will need to switch to true).
That’s all it takes to start running “conman” related commands. Figure 1 shows the showcpu command from ocli, which shows the available agents.

​OCLI is a powerful tool for operators, schedulers, and administrators. Easy to configure and to access multiple scheduling environments it opens much more automation opportunities. Specially when ocli model commands are available on the future release!
For a complete walk-through on the ocli, please check out this youtube video, with hand-on configuration and more insights on the OCLI.

Author

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​Juscelino Candido De Lima Junior 
Juscelino has over 15 years in the IT industry, at IBM, he started as an IT Specialist - Workload Automation, in the last five years working as an infrastructure and application IT architect. His areas of expertise include multi-cloud architecture, containers, microservices, observability, virtualization, networks, distributed systems, systems administration, production control, and enterprise job scheduling. IBM Master Inventor with +20 filed patents.