It is worth noting that IBM has an established program called IBM
Academic Initiatives.  If you offer any courses on your Zs and you
*need* z/VM to offer those courses, IBM will *possibly* negotiate a
free license of z/VM.  I'm at NIU and we have two ESA/390s donated by
IBM many years before my time.  It is also worth noting that we have
had difficulty with demonstrating that our curriculum *requires* VM,
which we would love to use to allow students to run their own guest
Linux/390 images, where they may be root and try things in a nicely
sandboxed environment.

Apparently, this is not a sufficient *need* as we have been
unsuccessful.  There has been some unconfirmed speculation that if we
but had a Z, we could institute a course in z/VM+z/Linux
administration, creating a need.  Unfortunately, when IBM offered us a
Z, university politics reared their ugly head, a Microsoft evangelist
convinced the big cheese that "Mainframe is dead" and not only will we
not be housing a Z, virtually assuring IBM won't send us one, they
have chosen to unplug our ESA/390s.

We now have to use Marist's machine remotely to conduct our mainframe
courses, which are many and varied, mainframe being the backbone of
our program.  It's a very sad tale but the silver lining is, perhaps
you folks up at Washington could offer the class, get the license, and
voila!

Just a thought,
Erik Johnson

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:08 PM, David Boyes <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 5/11/09 7:33 PM, "Gibney, Dave" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>    I may have some interest in zLinux around here. The usual caveat of
>> [snip]
>>   Good idea? Or am I making it more complicated than I need to?
>> Dave Gibney
>> Information Technology Services
>> Washington State University
>
> Well, it would certainly be cool to have WSUVM1 alive again...8-)
>
> Given WSU's historical relationship with IBM, I would suspect that if you
> asked IBM for a loaner copy of z/VM, one would appear for a long period of
> time. I think that while you *could* do VM->LPAR, it would probably be less
> hassle and more productive to try to negotiate a long-term loan.
>
> -- db
>
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