I think that you are talking about something that is either going to hit us real hard or IBM is going to come out with something that will eliminate the need to the CMS based tools "old folks" such as me and, having met a lot of you at SHARE conferences, most of the rest of you. You look around at SHARE and you almost never see someone who is closer to college age than retirement age. Those rare ones are not sitting in on the kind of VM sessions most of us do. There is, for all practical purposes, no IBM education that would take a new, inexperienced person from an Intro to VM course level to an advanced level.

Maybe this means that IBM is going to eliminate the need for us CP/CMS knowledgeable sysprogs. Notice the greatly expanded number of lpars that are permitted on the newer processors. An lpar is really a virtual machine running under a CP based hypervisor. How much CP/CMS is needed to carve out an lpar? Something like that may be where we are going--or at least the rest of you. I'll be at full SS retirement age in a year and a half.

Jim

David Boyes wrote:
All true at a high level. But, I think we're going to have to struggle
very soon with a number of these usability issues.  Note that in recent
IBM presentations on VM futures, CMS investment seldom or never appears.
Many of these functions (SFS, directory management, backup, etc) depend
on knowledge of CMS -- most of us on this mailing list survived the
situations that lead up to the development of these various Good Things,
so we have the context and the skill set to support them. We're entering
a time when that context is missing in the next generation of system
administrators, and we no longer have CMS users as the primary focus of
VM.=20

I believe we need to ask the question of usability improvement for these
functions. The skills are no longer there, and we are focusing VM on
serving a community that wants to develop them about as much as they
want to learn JCL. Telling someone to RTFM -- well, they'd have to find
the right FM first.=20

Perhaps I'm worrying about the "system after next" again. I think it's a
question that we need to start to think about, though.=20



--
Jim Bohnsack
Cornell University
(607) 255-1760
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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