> What can anyone out there tell me about ³Globally Dispersed Parallel
> Sysplex² for zOS, and zVM sharing DASD with that environment? 

GDPS is a pretty nifty idea and the demonstration process of it working is 
pretty dramatic. The positive benefits are pretty compelling -- if you can 
handle the downsides.

The biggest downside is that it's almost impossible to assemble a working GDPS 
without extensive help from IGS or some other third party. I don't know of any 
cookbook on how to build one yourself, and the implementation profits on 
projects of that magnitude alone make it unlikely that any such guide will get 
written anytime soon.

Second, it assumes an enormous load of IBM and Tivoli-based infrastructure 
management applications, some of which are incompatible with other vendor 
solutions, at a pretty stiff loss of functionality in some cases. If you're 
already heavily invested in IBM stuff, you may not mind so badly, but if you 
really smoke the CA/BMC weeds, you may not like that much at all. 

Third, as you've already observed, it's not very conscious of VM at all. Yes it 
has some VM interfaces that work acceptably for failover automation for Linux 
hosting, but if you still have CMS workload, you're not going to get much 
warning or safety for those users if/when a switch occurs. Enabling 
applications for SIGNAL SHUTDOWN processing is a big important step if you 
haven't already done so. 

> Is anyone running in this environment? 

I know of several overseas implementations, and a few domestic ones. It's 
fairly hard to do, so it isn't done lightly (or easily). 

> I really don¹t have a ³comfortable feeling² about this at all. It
> doesn¹t seem like a well thought-out product, if it won¹t support all of
> IBM¹s environment...

It's not really a product at all; it's a set of configurations and services 
that sell a LOT of other IBM products. If you have (or can tolerate) the 
prereqs, it's fairly slick when it works. If you don't (or can't), then it's 
going to be real painful. 

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