This isn't from experience, but I would imagine that you could simply dedicate the volumes you're using now to a virtual machine and ipl from the volume you're currently ipl'ing from now. In theory, it should just work. (Disk is disk is disk.)
The advantage minidisks will give you for future penguins is that you can put together much smaller "chunks" of dasd for an image. This would allow you to have /boot on its own 10 or 20 cyl "volume", and you could have at least two of them (/boot and /boot.alternate) to allow graceful recoveries from failed kernel installs. You could separate out your /home and / paths so that changing one wouldn't impact the other. You could split up the various / directories, and make the static ones read-only to the image. Not a big advantage if you only have one image, but when you get 10 or 100 and can share those static pieces, it becomes a savings in space and in work when upgrading. ---- Robert P. Nix internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mayo Clinic phone: 507-284-0844 200 1st St. SW page: 507-255-3450 Rochester, MN 55905 ---- "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, theory and practice are different." > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 10:40 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: transition to VM > > Currently running RH 7.2 in lpar mode (kernel: 2.4.9-37tape). We may be > getting z/VM in the future, which we've never used before. At least at > first look at the Building Linux Systems under IBM VM book, I'm confused > about the concept of minidisks. Do 3390 volumes have to be formatted > any differently in the z/VM enviroment than they would for a linux image > running LPAR mode? I guess what I'm asking is, apart from networking > stuff, can I expect to be able to define existing linux dasd volumes to > z/VM, login the guest and have the image boot? Or will I have to go > through some process to migrating the data to the minidisks so that they > work under z/VM? > > Sorry if the question doesn't make much sense, I'm still trying to get > my head around this stuff. Any pointers are appreciated. > ~ Daniel
