> I gotta say that the option Tim Sipples, proposed of running Oracle in a=20

> zOS guest under VM is a bit more practical than running Oracle 7, I just=20

> find it fascinating that Oracle appears to have abandoned VM, but not MVS.



Oracle had (and I suppose, still have) some large customers on z/OS, and that's 
DB/2's sweet spot. Being able to stick it to their biggest competitor is always 
a plus, and the enterprise agreements that were in place at the time with a lot 
of those customers for all platforms made Oracle much more attractive back 
then. If the OpenSolaris thing had worked out, we'd be in a very different 
place today. DB/2 VM's "poor stepchild" status really made it viable only as a 
VSAM replacement when IBM took CMS VSAM support out behind the barn, at least 
for the CMS compilers that still existed at the time.



Tim's idea would be useful if z/OSe was still actively marketed by IBM -- this 
was really exactly the kind of thing it was meant to do. I don't think IBM ever 
really got that message across to the z/OS customer base, though -- that was 
back in the "LPAR uber Alles" for z/OS virtualization days, and IBM (with some 
help) has bought a clue on VM and running production guest operating systems 
since then.



A full z/OS license at current prices just for creating appliances would be 
difficult to make work in a cost-effective manner, even if you stuck to 
IBM-only software. There's a lot of moving parts, and Oracle prices on z/OS 
reflect the "normal" z/OS marketplace pricing levels. It wouldn't be hard to do 
(would probably take us a couple weeks to do it), but it would be tough to make 
it worth someone's while to create and support it with no contractual backing 
from Oracle or IBM.

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