Winmonitors are here! 1790

Larry Bristol

IBM already has such a facility: zVM and Linux for the zSeries. And yes, lots of big corporations are taking notice. This is about the third hit that I found when Googling for "linux mainframe":

According to Scott Courtney, a senior engineer at large scale systems and network integrator Sine Nomine buttociates, you can use LPARs to carve a zSeries mainframe into fifteen physical parbreastions or resource pools, each of which can be further divided into multiple virtual Linux machines using z-VM. Doing so, says Courtney, provides a host of further advantages. "For starters, you are not limited to 15 Linux machines. My company has customers that are running hundreds of Linux virtual machines on a single mainframe, within a single LPAR, while legacy mainframe batch systems continue to run on other LPARs. In a test-lab situation, one of our engineers has successfully booted over 97,000 Linux virtual machines simultaneously on a single mainframe, with each of these Linux instances running a Web server application under simulated load. We don't recommend trying to consolidate 97,000 servers onto one mainframe--this was just a lab test--but several hundred is no problem at all, depending on the nature of the application(s)."

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