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- Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!auvm!UCLAMVS.BITNET!CSYSMAS
- Message-ID: <IBM-MAIN%92122314530248@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
- Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 12:51:00 PST
- Sender: IBM Mainframe Discussion list <IBM-MAIN@RICEVM1.BITNET>
- From: Michael Stein <CSYSMAS@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
- Subject: Re: Logical Partitions/Physical Partitions
- Lines: 47
-
- > With all of the "maybe"s and "there is a possibility"s, it
- > sounds like you should be running VM/ESA on the bare metal
- > (unpartitioned). Given identical configurations (all-dedicated
- > everything, idential main store, identical ESTORE), the
- > performance of a production guest under LPAR and under VM/ESA
- > should be about the same (after all, VM and LPAR are both using
- > the same machine facilities to do their job). VM gives you the
- > option of running your test systems V=V, so that you don't tie
- > up valuable system resources (core, channel paths) for
- > partitions that you aren't using very much. Besides, it comes
- > with CMS!
-
- VM is nice for testing systems (running test systems), however
- there are some problems in running production MVS systems
- under it.
-
- - reliability
- VM adds yet another point of failure to your MVS system. Also
- in my experience VM isn't as good at recovering from errors as
- MVS -- thus it's not just another point of failure, it's worse
- than just twice as bad as MVS alone.
-
- - support of new hardware
- VM tends to have later support for new hardware, thus
- restricting you from installing new hardware (and selling the
- old while it's still worth something).
-
- - complexity
- VM is much more complex than LPAR. Besides taking system
- programmer time to support/maintain it, there are more things
- which can go wrong (I/O support, CMS which is at least needed
- to maintain VM).
-
- - performance (?)
- It's easy to say that VM and LPAR should have the same
- overhead, however it may not be. It's probably easy to start
- using some VM services which have a large impact on the
- performance. And if you can't use the VM services why pay for
- VM? (reliability, $, maintenance, support etc).
-
- We run an ES/9000-600 shared between academic and administrative
- computing. There are 4 LPARs, divided as follows:
-
- - academic MVS production
- - academic VM (test MVS, AIX, test AIX, test VM)
- - administrative MVS production
- - administrative test MVS
-