I see that the list traffic is kind of light right now and though I
would toss out a topic for all of us to chew on.
I am looking for your thoughts on the current direction of zVM in
particular where development needs to be focused.
I sense that z/VM 6.2 with SSI will ease the burden of medium to large
shops in the area of multi-system maintenance, and hopefully will be
extended beyond it's current meager 4 system max size, sooner rather
than later.
Given the difficulty in making any changes to production workloads I
don't see SSI with Live Guest Migration (LGM) as a panacea to issue
related to load balancing amongst lpars. Without more direct linux
interaction I am concerned about the migration of workloads using
dedicated fcp with or without NPIV as well as arp issues.
The area I would like to see development is the utilization of the
hardware some of us are lucky enough to have, the z196. With a machine
that can be delivered with 3TB of memory(1.5TB on a z10), having a
maximum size z/VM system of 256GB is very limiting. In reviewing
presentations on memory limits, I have read comments that the system has
been tested to more than 400GB central storage but no indication
(statement of direction...rumor) that the current limit will be
increased. So I am pushing for increasing the max z/VM LPAR to at
least 512MB if not larger.
Expansion of the link aggregation implementation allowing for shared OSA
cards.
In general I am focused on larger vm systems, so that is where I would
like to see development.
Phil Tully
Viewpoints presented here are my own and not my employer's
