On 5/05/2012 2:55 AM, George Henke wrote:
tyvm, John, Mark, Edward.
Mark,
Do I need an Enterprise Class z114 box or will a Business Class one suffice?
John,
A compelling reason for server consolidation on zBx as IBM pointed out in
their z Summit is that zMIPS GCPs are totally dedicated to regular workload
processing, no I/O - that is done by the channels, CHPIDs.
Whereas all other servers use the GCPs for both normal processing and I/O.
So all MIPS are not equal.
What IBM didn't mention in the Z Summit was that offloading I/O to
peripheral hardware hasn't been
exclusive to mainframes for a very long time. Let's take the platform
you want to replace (SPARC) as an example.
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/developer/support/driver/wps/pci/html/Sun_SPARC.doc.html
The terminology may be different but it sure looks like all the I/O,
including interrupts, is offloaded to peripheral processors.
Even the much maligned (on this forum) Intel x86 has DMA and the new E5
range even has integrated 10GBe and PCIe-3 on the board.
Mainframe didn't get PCIe-2 until last year, which it re-branded FICON
Express8S.
Years ago when my wife was working for HDS and I had a lively discussion
at a Christmas lunch with some of her colleagues about the the mainframes
superior I/O. They scoffed at me like I had been living in a cave for
the last decade. I was respectfully informed that the high-end UNIX boxes
easily kept pace with the mainframes wrt I/O performance. Most
embarrassing was the fact that mainframes were still huffing and puffing
away on half-duplex ESCON when the competition was racing away on super
fast fibre channel. That was a very humbling experience for me.
Since most commerical workloads are I/O, not CPU, bound this amounts to
substantial CPU savings.
Also, it is the IBM operating system architecture, FLIH, that enables this
to happen and there is no other server in the world that is configured
thus.
Maybe I'm missing the point but what does a z/OS FLIH have to do with
porting workloads to zLinux?
On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 2:39 PM, McKown, John
<john.mck...@healthmarkets.com>wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List
[mailto:IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of George Henke
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2012 1:02 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu
Subject: It's feeding time in Jurassic Park . . .
and the dinosaurs are very hungry.
I need to migrate 50 Solaris servers to zLinux under z/VM on
a z114 and
about the same number of Windows servers to zBx.
Congrats!
Does anyone have experience with this, some ideas?
Experience, no. Ideas, sure! Why not?<grin>
Need a migration path.
Some questions:
Can z114 be upgraded to include zBx or must I upgrade to a
z196 for that?
I am not sure.
Can zBx be SYSPLEXed between 2 CECs?
No. a zBx can be attached to at most 1 CEC.
If not, how do I eliminate the SPF, how do I do failover for the blade
servers?
SPF? Single point of failure? You need to have multiple z114s with and
associated zBX.
I think you'd do failover just like you would with any other "racked
mounted" servers.
If the rack fails, all the servers fail. So you need the same techniques
with a zBX "rack".
I'm not a PC person, but I think this involves TCP connections between a
server and it's failover
twin.
How do I convert Solaris to zLInux under z/VM? Solaris is
not supported by
zBx.
Must I recompile the applications running under Solaris to
run them under
zLinux?
Yes, you must recompile. z/Linux runs on the z/Architecture instruction
set. Solaris runs on
Intel or SPARC(?). You can't run Intel or SPARC instructions on a z.
However there are two exceptions
that I can think of which __may__ not need recompilation. The first is
Java code. The .jar and .class
files should run on any compatible JVM, regardless of the underlying
hardware architecture. Another
possibility is .NET applications. They __might__ run on a z/Linux using
Mono. Again, because they
don't run "native", but on an instruction emulator. Shell scripts may need
some changing. Perl, Python, Ruby
and other intepreted language may need some changing, depending on the
levels of the intepreter
on z/Linux versus the one on Solaris.
--
George Henke
(C) 845 401 5614
I wish we were doing something like this. But we're z/OS only and IT
management would like to go MS-Windows only.
--
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT
Administrative Services Group
HealthMarkets(r)
9151 Boulevard 26 * N. Richland Hills * TX 76010
(817) 255-3225 phone *
john.mck...@healthmarkets.com * www.HealthMarkets.com
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