Most new site people order the COD. You can install from USB (or DVD on the older HMCs that still have them), but you still have to eventually IPL z/OS once you load the volumes. The ADCD system is shipped on DVD's for just that purpose as is the academic z/os image. The USB based method is actually just a bunch of .ISO images.
The down side is that it VERY slow. I mean watching paint dry or watching window glass melt kind of slow. It's actually faster to use the DVD (or the COD tape) to bring up the stand alone dfdss and use real carts. I also think that someone from Israel had a product a few years back that allowed you to mount network dasd and you could access it from an image or even from the HMC, but I can't remember the name of the product or if it "actually" did that. Brian On Fri, 2 Mar 2018 10:46:41 -0500, John Eells <[email protected]> wrote: >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] > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, >send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
