> Do we have any equivalent "System Health Checker" for z/VM? Would be an interesting Summer of Code project if someone were willing to mentor the student. You'd need a college that still had a VM system, though -- which pretty much limits it to a few candidates. Generalizing it to use libvirt would be very interesting (so it'd support more than just VM) but I doubt you'd find enough experience or skills to do it at the level that people can afford.
I think the other barrier to such a thing would be that to bypass the isolation of guests that VM is so good at to get the information you need about the system, you'd have to run this thing in an ID with so many privileges that it'd be a serious risk to system stability -- coding safely in a privileged environment is not a common skill, and is never a task for the faint of heart. TRACK comes close to having that data, but TRACK is also maintained by people with decades of experience in writing and maintaining code with that kind of privilege active. Not for the ordinary mortal. Also, what does "healthy" mean in a hypervisor-only environment? It's not just performance, and with VM, there's usually several "right" ways to do something depending on how you see the end goal. You'd need a recommended reference architecture (which, so far, IBM has not been willing to step up to recommending) to compare against, and you'd need tooling to interrogate pieces of the system that don't have consistent APIs to get the information (for example, can you tell whether there is an active ESM on the system w/o running control blocks? I'm not aware of any way to tell, other than parsing Q NAMES and looking for the usual suspects). How about networking? Disk technology? You'd also need to cope with the fact that VM is still heavily used to host non-Linux guests, and what's right for Linux is often completely wrong for those kind of guests. No reason not to try to produce such a thing, but there's a lot more scenarios than just the Linux one. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
