We are now at 6 IFL's and are in the process of adding 6 more under our z9. We moved our workload from AIX to zVM/Linux SLES. Next is the SUN workloads and that will require more IFL's. We had a zOS systems programmer and no experience with zVM. My background is also zOS and I had used VM back in the early 80's before PR/SM came along. Challenges: 1) getting our AIX and SUN compadres to give up on the idea that they own the hardware. They found it hard to accept that the zVM was kind of a big brother. 2) changing the paradigm on how I/O's are handle in the zVM / z9 world compared to the distributed system environment. 3) changing the way we do fail-over and how we mitigate risk in this new z-Series brave world. 4) convincing software vendors that licensing had to change to deal with virtualization. Some never accepted it so we are paying more than we need to. 5) some software vendors (SAS for example) just refused to support their product under Linux when running under z-Series. 6) the hardware is expensive. Our distributed system fellows go crazy when we say $80k for 8 GB of memory. They go nuts when we say we have to reduce memory to the point of paging to the SWAP allocated under zVM virtual disks (going most likely to expanded memory).
Good news: 1) big improvements in batch processing turn-around time. 2) less number of CPU's to do the same work with the consequences in CPU-based licensing. 3) floor space and power usage (our diesel requirements dropped). 4) RAS. 5) We can now provision servers on minutes instead of months. 6) Our peaks have more head room now under the z9 than before because all of the CPU's can be made available to a single guest. Hope this helps. -- Yours truly, Yu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
