Hello, Nimesh. welcome to the club. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Hi All > >I'm a MVS systems engineer who is now doing some LINUX work. We won't hold that against you. :-) >As is the trend these days, Management wants to know what cost savings >they can achieve by moving workloads to the LINUX partition. >We are running SuSe 7.0 on a Z67 and Z900 platforms . Done correctly, there can be significant cost savings by consolidating existing PC-based workloads onto the S/390 platforms. Some applications are a very good fit (e.g., mail serving, web hosting, file sharing), and others are not (e.g., scientific number crunching). What applications are you running now and on what platforms? >I have been asked in particular whether the following (points below) are >possible > on our mainframe LINUX partitions. Apologies if the questions may sound stupi >or inconsistent .... > Here there's no such thing as a "stupid question"; we've all asked these sorts of things before. >1) A product called VMWARE was used on a LINUX system on PC to successfully te >t > Windows 2000 >emulation and running INTEL type work. Will we be able to use VIF on mainframe >SuSe to achieve > the same success ?. If, by success, you mean will you be able to do the same sorts of things on your z900 processor that you can do with VMWARE on an Intel box, the answer is yes, you bet! Actually, it will be even better because you will not be limited to the four operating system images that VMWARE has; you can define and run as many S/390 operating systems (z/OS, z/VM, Linux for S/390, TPF, VSE) as you'd like; limited to whatever your physical processor resources can support. The ability to "virtualize" S/390 resources is much more advanced and fine grained than what the Intel architecture and VMWARE can give you. >With VIF how many LINUX "images" will I be able to create on one partition on >the mainframe ? The actual number of images that you can run will be effectively limited only by the amount of hardware resources that you choose to give to the VIF LPAR. But consider this: VIF is being withdrawn from marketing; consider strongly going to it's replacement product, z/VM. You'll be much happier in the long run. The largest number of Linux images I have heard about being defined and run on a large IBM processor was something like 97,400! > Does anybody know the cost of VIF (both monthly and once off...). As mentioned above, VIF is being withdrawn from marketing; go with the z/VM replacement product instead. z/VM now has a OTC, I believe, on a per processor engine basis. You're local IBM rep can get you accurate pricing information; maybe even work a special deal for you. Can't hurt to ask. :-) >2) Can we run NT servers under VIF ??? If so, What is the limit and is it one >server per "image" ? ... > Since NT servers are written for the Intel processor architecture and not the IBM S/390 one, the short answer is no, you can't. There is an Intel emulator called "boch" (sp?) I think, that will emulate an Intel processor; it runs as a standard Linux application on S/390. But: 1) as an emulator, it's slow, even on fast S/390 hardware 2) there will almost certainly be licensing issues with Microsoft, as they don't license their software to run on non-Intel platforms. It is much better, all the way around, to replace the NT servers, with open source Linux ones, and run those instead. >Hopefully my questions made sense ... Likewise my answers! :-) Let us know if you have any more questions or concerns. Good luck! Dave Jones V/Soft Software, Inc. 18502 Purdy Ct. Houston, TX 77084 (281) 578-7544 (voice) (281) 578-1899 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.vsoft-software.com >Regards >Nimesh > Dave Jones
