Why PR/SM over VM - less overhead, less software to manage/understand Is anyone running close to 60 z/OS LPARs on a single box? If you really need it you can run VM if you want to.
Why $6 Million to add an LPAR? Are you adding capacity or using more of what you already have? Have LPAR/instance based software contracts? Regulatory/contractual requirements have little to do with efficient use of resources. If I was a paying customer on someone else's box I would want my own LPAR, DASD, Network separate from other customers (possibly competitors). It might be unlikely but I could write authorized code to snoop into your data or you mine. -----Original Message----- George Henke Let's face it, even by IBM's admission, PR/SM is little more than VM in microcode. So why put VM in microcode in the first place and limit us to only 60 LPARs. Why not just give us VM "as is" and let us decide how many instances of z/OS under z/VM we would like to run as well as the mix with z/LINUX, AIX, etc? And then lock us in to this configuration with "sub-capacity pricing". Maybe because it will sell more hardware? "How many LPARs does it take to screw in a light bulb?", to paraphrase the old sysprog question. None, it is a hardware problem. "Don't fence me in" As Ken pointed out earlier in this trail, it is indeed possible to put it all in one LPAR and configure WLM, in lieu of PR/SM, to manage the weightings. Thank you, Ken, great hearing from you again. We are a small shop here and my client is looking at $6 million in additional software charges just to add a new QA LPAR and, quite frankly, if it were my money, for that price, I would find some way to run QA in the DEV LPAR. Hijacking the DR LPAR, however tempting, will not save anything either because the incremental software costs are not incurred until there is a "real" disaster. Centralize "whatever" and you minimize cost (TCO) and maximize control, albeit at the cost of flexibility; Management 101. After all is not MVS a far more robost operating system than VM which, by the admission of its own authors, is really little more than a hypervisor developed, of yore, to test different versions of MVS? Why would we NOT use MVS instead of VM, alias PR/SM, to do multitasking and manage workloads? Why look to a hypervisor to do the job that MVS was designed to do and far more capable of doing? Just because it is nice and neat, has the appearance of being separated, and is someone else's money? Someday management will grant bonuses to sysprogs for a percentage of the $ they will save the company by finding more cost-efficient ways of attaining their goals. Actually, Pratt and Whitney, already does this. As for SOX and customer demands for their own LPARs, there needs to be a risk assessment first. Where's the risk? Controls are designed for risk. No risk, no need for a control. Playing up risk is one of the oldest tricks in the saleman's book.. I can almost hear Robert Preston now . . . "Ohhhhhhhh, There's trouble, trouble, I say, right here, in River City". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
