Beesley, Paul wrote:
We are setting up a z/Next mainframe on a greenfield site and want to be able
to install z/OS from a DVD.
Back in 2016, Mark Post said..
“Coming soon will be the ability to IPL _and_ install directly from the HMC DVD
drive. It'll be a slow as !@$$ but it won't require an installation server
somewhere. You'll still need to connect _into_ the system over the network to
complete the install (via SSH or VNC) of course. Even that could be avoided if
you set up a custom DVD that points to an autoinst.xml file on the DVD itself
and use VNC as the installation method. Completely unattended install without
a net. :)”
Has ‘soon’ arrived yet? Or are we still looking at using a Customised Offering
Driver?
<snip>
You will need to use the COD.
Although Linux and z/VM can be IPLed from DVD, z/OS must IPL from
attached (ECKD) DASD. It does not now and will likely not any time soon
support IPLed from anywhere in the HMC file system, including DVD.
Based on that, the DVD-based installation process involves the
Customized Offerings Driver (which we affectionately call the COD).
Standalone DFSMSdss, which can be IPLed from the HMC's DVD drive, was
changed a while back to support restoring disk volumes from DVD files.
The COD z/OS system is restored using DFSMSdss and then IPLed. (You can
optionally use standalone ICKDSF to verify target volume labels and INIT
the volumes before restoring them, but we taught DFSMSdss to be a bit
smarter a while back so this is no longer a required step.)
The restores run reasonably quickly, though I don't have current
numbers. When we first planned this support we thought it would take a
lot longer than it actually does, because we--well, I (blush)--forgot
that we dumped the COD systems with the COMPRESS keyword, which reduces
the HMC-to-DASD data transfer time significantly. If I recall
correctly, the entire process from DFSMSdss IPL to z/OS IPL only takes a
few hours.
In turn, the COD z/OS system supports installing the z/OS you actually
want from direct download to z/OS (if you have connectivity at the site)
or by transferring files from a workstation to the z/OS UNIX file
system, whether they were downloaded or are also on DVD. You can
install a new copy of z/OS using ServerPac (if you are sane) or CBPDO
(if you aren't); the COD supports both.
It might also be possible to use the FTP-based IPL available on z14 and
later HMCs for DFSMSdss and FTP file access for the restores, with the
files on your workstation (set up as an FTP server), which I am told
should work, but which we have not explicitly tested. That might or
might not be faster than restoring from DVD, depending on where the
bottleneck is in the effective data transfer rate. Speaking for myself,
though, restores from DVD would certainly have been done for quite a
while while I was still fiddling with the FTP configuration and physical
connections for this IPL path, but YMMV.
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
[email protected]
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