We do these kinds of conversions/migrations all the time (9 so far this year from 1.4, 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8) , and you can indeed run your z/OS 1.6 under z/VM on the z/196 without the toleration maintenance applied, mostly because there isn't any that you can apply to z/OS 1.6 for that box in the first place :).
You cannot run z/OS 1.6 directly on the z/196, no matter how you define the LPAR. You CAN do it on some other boxes by limiting the "defined" number of CPU's to 1, but you can't do that by simply having them varied offline or anything. It's not something that I suggest you do without being on the phone to give you all of the steps. That said, I have run z/OS 1.6 on a z/114, but we DID add some "special" maintenance to make that happen and I would not EVER suggest that you run a production system that way, we did it solely as a exercise for IBM and not as part of a "real" conversion. The bigger question I guess is why you would not Install z/OS 1.12 or 1.13 (or soon 2.1) on the z/196 and quickly migrate to it from your existing box. z/VM is not hard to install, but the effort, especially if you are not already familiar with how to install and run it, can be an extra level of complexity that you may not want to deal with. I don't know anything about your site, but frequently z/VM is touted by IBM as a set-and-forget type of solution for hardware conversions that force OS upgrades, when it actually is anything but. Although if you expect that migration to take a while, moving to the new box under z/VM is a good choice. Normally it takes me about a week at most to install a new z/OS release at a customer site, and depending on the complexity of their site and how many (and the complexity of) system mods, as well as taking into account that some other products may need (or they may want them to be whether they are "needed" or not) to be upgraded as well, it takes between 2 more weeks to 12 weeks for me to complete the migration. There are a lot of things that can go wrong in a "long jump" migration, but most of them are easy to correct (especially once you have seen them a bunch of times), so you won't have too much of a problem with this type of direct migration from z/OS 1.6 to 1.12 or 1.13. I know that IBM wants people to perform that migration in multiple jumps, but for most (if not all) sites, that is completely unnecessary. If you want to contact me off list, I can give you some pointers on how to perform the conversion quickly (and more importantly, successfully), without bringing z/VM into the picture. I have installed z/OS now well over 200 times, and z/VM has been part of that process less than 10% of the time, and "most" of those times it really wasn't necessary, but the client had other reasons for wanting to get z/VM into the picture, and the client normally gets what they want. Brian Westerman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
