Hi Edward; Welcome to the game....
The cost of Linux may all be related to what you plan to do with it. For a
proof of concept, and if you¹re familiar with Linux already, you could try
the Debian distribution, which has no cost. There are one or two others as
well which should be free distributions, but without what a mainframer would
consider normal support. I did install a Debian distribution here early on
in the process, but it didn¹t have a true purpose other than to see if it
worked, and has since had its space reclaimed. I haven¹t tried it, but I
think there is also a Slackware distribution for z.
You can get the SuSE or RedHat distributions, but depending on where you go,
there could be a cost involved. I think that the SuSE initial trial we did
cost quite a bit for a trial, but included several months of actual support
from SuSE. (Now Novell) I¹m not sure if the RedHat trial would be the same.
Once you get past the trial phase, and if you intend to run a production
environment, you¹ll likely want support from somewhere. IBM can be
contracted, with a fee, of course, to support either SuSE or RedHat. This
gives you one place to call for all the problems within the box, rather than
having several. And you¹ll likely have to pay something to RedHat or Novell
for the actual license for the product, so that you¹ll be able to get
service as time goes forward.
In choosing a distribution, you¹ll also want to consider what you¹ll be
running there. Various products have been certified on either SuSE or
RedHat, or possibly both, but I¹ve never seen an official statement of
something like WebSphere being certified to run on Debian. If, ultimately,
you have a specific product in mind, it might be good to trial the
distribution that that product would ultimately need in order to get proper
support from the vendor.
In our case, we are running SuSE on our z9 boxes, with our support through
IBM. For all our other Linux platforms, we run RedHat, and have a site
license from RedHat for the systems and support. In keeping with our ³One of
everything² unofficial policy, we also have AIX and Solaris... And VMS,
which is ³almost Unix². Our datacenters are described as ³at least one of
everything ever made²...
Having gone through what you¹re starting, if there is anything I can help
you with or answer, please feel free to contact me. (This is true for anyone
as well, not just Edward.) If nothing else, I can say ³Yeah, we saw that
too...² :-)
--
.~. Robert P. Nix Mayo Foundation
/V\ RO-OC-1-13 200 First Street SW
/ ( ) \ 507-284-0844 Rochester, MN 55905
^^-^^ -----
"In theory, theory and practice are the same, but
in practice, theory and practice are different."
From: "Edward M. Martin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: The IBM z/VM Operating System <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:52:42 -0500
To: <[email protected]>
Conversation: Question on LINUX
Subject: Question on LINUX
Hello Everyone,
I am just being to review LINUX on z/VM. I have played with it on a
PC, took an IBM install class way back when.
The question I have been asked ³is Linux for z/VM truly free?². Or
are there costs that HAVE to be incurred?
Salesmen never true answers.
Ed Martin
Aultman Health Foundation
330-588-4723
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
ext. 40441
