Phil, I'll 2nd your opinion that 4 systems in the SSI is meager. I'm already in a quandary there with 4 prod systems and capacity planning asking where we put the next ones. So now I'm not sure if we step into SSI with all 4 or have to immediately start with 2 plexes. If two, we're giving up something.
I don't see LGR as a load balancing solution at all. We will continue to use our F5 load balancers as well as the WAS IHS plugin for that effort. I see it more for a planned outage move for things you want to move away for a while without the reboot. 512M seems like a good next target given our 196's can do 3TB. We leave half for failover so that would mean we would do 3 prod LPARs on the box, with the 3 standby. That seems reasonable. Avoiding VMWARE type sprawl I think is a good thing :) We've just moved to the 10Gig OSAs and away from the LACP for a couple of reasons, so that is not as important to us. The cost of OSA ports IMHO probably doesn't justify VM developer time. Replication, large ECKD minidisks, zHPF (or any I/O related things to keep ECKD perf on par with FCP), are things that are important here. With the z196s being the fastest thing out there now, I see an avalanche of new workload coming. Sounds the same for you. (PS. I'll 2nd Marty's idea of getting involved in SHARE if you can!) Marcy -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU] On Behalf Of PHILIP TULLY Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 8:31 AM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: [IBMVM] zvm directions 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
