'The speed of progress' ? Is it not moving fast enough for you, Sergey? Perhaps we need 'dinosaur crossing' signs stamped on the z... ?
I am personally not worried about slowing down the world ... I have failed even when actively trying ;-) I stay in shape running to catch up.. Scott Rohling On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Sergey Korzhevsky <s_korzhev...@iba.by> wrote: > Hi Mark, > > Thank you for detailed answer, but, actually, your vision is not > contradicted with mine, you just confirmed that the huge jump was made in > the last decade because of Linux on mainframe (in z/VM particularly). > I hope that with people like you, the speed of progress won't be slow > down. > > > WBR, Sergey > > > > > Mark Post <mp...@suse.com> > Sent by: Linux on 390 Port <LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU> > 28-09-15 23:39 > Please respond to Linux on 390 Port > > To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU > cc: > Subject: Re: Documentation for Linux on z Systems and KVM - > new > > > >>> On 9/28/2015 at 02:25 AM, Sergey Korzhevsky <s_korzhev...@iba.by> > wrote: > > Alan Altmark wrote: > >>> What is it about z that makes virtualization work better? > >>50 years of work on it? > > > > That is interesting answer. One thing came to my mind is the live guest > > relocation. As far as i could find, VMware introduced that feature > > (vMotion) in 2003, z/VM - in 2011. The same regarding network > > (GuestLAN/VSwitch). > > So, looks like z/VM slept all that years and was wake up by x86 world > > recently. > > Having been an active participant and observer of the community for a > while now, I think I can contribute some perspective. (From what I can > tell, you have been also so I find your comment a little surprising.) > > When Linux for the mainframe was first introduced, a lot of facilities we > take for granted today didn't exist. Guest LANs, VSWITCHes, cooperative > memory management and so on. That started to change pretty quickly. > Things that actually helped running more than just a few instances of > Linux were introduced and made life much easier. Live Guest Relocation > wasn't needed then, because not many shops were running huge amounts of > guests. That pain came along later. Even then, it wasn't for the same > reason that the x86 world wanted it. > > Mainframe shops running Linux on z/VM didn't worry much about hardware > failures and migrating workload to relieve overloaded servers usually > wasn't an issue because of decades of performance and capacity management. > What "we" wanted it for was because z/VM was so reliable it could run for > years but sometimes various maintenance was important to put on the > system. Trying to get multiple customers of the service to agree on a > maintenance window was becoming nearly impossible, because although they > wanted High Availability, they weren't willing to actually invest in it, > so the workload couldn't be failed over to another server in a cluster. > > There was another factor, although not a technical one. Many customers > have become checklist driven. If your product doesn't allow them to put > check marks in all the boxes on the list, it's obviously not a good > product and not worthy of consideration. So, z/VM development was getting > reports from Sales that this function was needed, just to be "in the > game." And, being the group that they are, z/VM development wanted to > approach the development needed in a more "system of systems" oriented way > than just bolting on a feature. Thus, Single System Image was born, and > it took quite a while and a lot of people to bring to the market. Taking > into account the various diversions that were forced on them during the > same period of time, it's amazing they got it out as quickly as they did. > > I think most people that have been in the z/VM world for a long time would > agree that having Linux available on the mainframe has breathed new life > into z/VM. Since then, they've been working hard to introduce things that > make sense for the mainframe environment. What new items they work on, > and what priority they have, _can_ be influenced by current and potential > customers. I encourage anyone who has thoughts on what those new items > should be to speak up, whether here or in the IBMVM mailing list, or at > SHARE. There are people in these mailing lists and at SHARE that have a > direct line into the z/VM and Linux development groups at IBM. Take > advantage of that. > > > Mark Post > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or > visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For more information on Linux on System z, visit > http://wiki.linuxvm.org/ > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or > visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For more information on Linux on System z, visit > http://wiki.linuxvm.org/ > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
