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| Mainframe Virtualization and Cloud Computing |
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Virtualization plays an important role in mainframe hardware. By implementing virtualization software, it is possible to virtualize the processor, memory, storage I/O, and networking resources into aggregated pools; applications can utilize resource pools without regard to specific hardware. This improves utilization of the mainframe and reduces the need for upgrades. Upgrades in mainframe hardware will improve processing for virtualized operating systems and development platforms: Linux, Db2 for z/OS, and Java. IBM has been modernizing the mainframe platform. The z/VM operating system can support hundreds of Linux images simultaneously.
The distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 has to do with whether an underlying operating system is present.
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Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the system hardware and are referred to as a native or bare metal or embedded hypervisors in vendor literature. Type 2 hypervisors run on a host operating system. According to IBM, Type 1 hypervisors provide higher performance, availability, and security than Type 2 hypervisors. IBM recommends that Type 2 hypervisors be used mainly on client systems where efficiency is less critical or on systems where support for a broad range of I/O devices is important and can be provided by the host operating system.
A cloud service is seldom comprised of a single virtual machine; it will be front-ended by load balancers, clustered on web application servers, and connected to a highly available database on bare metal native hardware. However, virtualization without visibility and control across the cloud introduces security and compliance concerns. IT automation is central to successful virtualization and building a cloud stack: operating system environment, storage, database installation and tablespace, and creation of user accounts. Many of these IT tasks are done manually or are outsourced to public cloud providers. Cloud orchestration can be used to automate these tasks; this makes the cloud faster and less expensive. Cloud orchestration automates the configuration, coordination, and management of public and private cloud infrastructure: storage, network, performance, provisioning, and workflows for service delivery. Virtualization in conjunction with IT automation and process orchestration facilitates self-service, improving service delivery, and reducing costs.
Mainframe hardware typically experiences degradation in performance when a greater number of users run applications that are increasingly complex. Common upgrades to IBM mainframe systems include improvements to processing power and memory. New processors help to tackle more calculation-intensive tasks, additional memory supports more sophisticated applications with less storage access, and cryptographic coprocessors handle encryption and decryption dynamically.
Web-enabled applications can be accessed by the organization's website or a native application. An advantage associated with a web-enabled application is the utilization of other web services such as security and personalization. Providing information through a web service also can help administrators troubleshoot mainframe applications.
Organizations are evaluating whether mission critical applications can be moved from distributed Intel servers to virtualized Linux/UNIX-variant environments on IBM System z mainframe systems. The economics underlying the cost savings are a reduction in data center real estate, middleware and application licensing
costs, and the cost associated with volume purchases of Intel-based servers to meet growing capacity requirements. Another issue is the increasingly prohibitive data center power and cooling requirements which may ultimately
shift x86 workloads to IBM mainframe systems. Kilowatts per server are measured in the acquisition costs of Intel servers.
IBM System z advanced hardware provides the capability to lpartition the machine, share CPU, memory and I/O channels and associated devices, add and remove computing capacity on demand, and provide high speed communications among partitions. System z hypervisor technologies collectively deliver efficient support and dispatching of multiple LPARs: Logical Partitions and virtual machines. PR/SM: Processor Resource/Systems Manager is System z hardware technology using a Type 1 hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same physical processor; each operating system is running in its own LPAR. The Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the system hardware. Type 2 hypervisors run on a host operating system that provides virtualization services, such as I/O device support and memory management.
The IBM z/VM implementation of virtualization technology allows full-function operating systems such as Linux on IBM System z, z/OS, z/VSE, and z/TPF to function as 31- and 64- bit guests of z/VM. The z/VM operating system is a flexible test and production environment on the IBM System z platform. Each user has a virtual machine as a working environment which simulates the existence of a dedicated real machine, including processor functions, memory, networking, and input/output resources. Operating systems and application programs can run in virtual machines as guests. Development, testing, and production environments can share a single physical computer.
The z/VM virtual machine provides the capability to:
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The z/VM CP: Control Program is primarily a hypervisor and real-machine resource manager. CP provides each user with a virtual machine working environment. Each virtual machine is a functional equivalent of a real system, sharing the real processor function, storage, console, and input/output device resources. At logon, CP controls the working environment. Facilities of the z/VM are immediately available; however, most of the work done on z/VM requires the CMS: Conversational Monitor System or a guest operating system, such as z/OS, to assist with data processing tasks and manage work flow. z/VM CMS: Conversational Monitor System provides a high capacity application environment that can support large numbers of interactive users performing a wide variety of tasks. The SFS: Shared File System is an extension of the CMS file system that provides extended file management and file sharing functions.
LGR: Live Guest Relocation allows a running Linux virtual machine to be moved without disruption from one z/VM system to another within a z/VM SSI cluster. This provides continuity for virtual server workloads over planned z/VM and machine outages, such as service and hardware upgrades. Applications can remain available over such outages with less impact to the application and less setup required. Verification of required resources and machine features are performed on the destination system prior to the relocation. Verification also can be performed on request to assess a guest's eligibility for relocation. In an SSI cluster comprised of different machine models, the architecture level presented to each guest is specified to the set of machine features common to the member systems to which the guest may be relocated.
System z PR/SM can currently support up to 60 logical partitions. z/VM runs in an LPAR and provides a virtualization layer designed to allow the capability to run hundreds to thousands of virtual server images for larger deployments.
There are two types of partitions. A dedicated partition runs on the same dedicated physical processors at all times and the processors are not available for use by other partitions even if the operating system running on that partition has no work to do. This eliminates the need for PR/SM to get involved with swapping out one guest and dispatching another. Shared partitions can run on all remaining processors that are not be being used by dedicated partitions. This allows idle systems to be replaced by systems with work to be performed at the expense of PR/SM overhead incurred by the dispatching of the operating systems. Shared partitions provide increased processor utilization, but at the potential expense of performance for a single operating system.
With IBM LPAR, businesses have the ability to virtualize computing resources across multiple operating environments.
| Application Development and Deployment | Application Infrastructure | Business Analytics and Data Warehousing | Data Management |
| CICS Transaction Server Db2 Enterprise COBOL for z/OS Enterprise PL/1 for z/OS Rational Developer for System z |
Problem Determination Tools WebSphere Application Server IBM MQ IBM Integration Bus |
Cognos Business Intelligence for z/OS SPSS Analytical Decision Management for Linux on System z DB2 QMF: Query Management Facility |
Cloudant Compose Db2 for LUX: Linux/UNIX/Windows Db2 for z/OS Db2 Tools for z/OS IMS Transaction Server |
However, virtualization is not by itself the true value of a cloud. Virtualization without visibility and control across the cloud introduces security and compliance concerns. A cloud service is seldom comprised of a single virtual machine. Managing the complexity of an enterprise app is more than simple virtualization. A cloud service will be front-ended by load balancers, clustered on web application servers, and connected to a highly available database. High transaction databases are kept on bare metal native hardware for optimum performance. IT automation, self-service, and service orchestration will have to be designed, implemented, coded, tested, and maintained.
Online demand computing is a model for improving ROI: Return on Investment on information technology hardware. Cloud computing has been a beneficiary of virtualization enabling many organizations to share computing resources and pay only for use. As part of the Cloud First initiatives, federal agencies are required to consider cloud options before new investments are made in information technology. The government also is consolidating servers and data centers in an effort streamline its costs. Significant benefits associated with virtualization are resource consolidation: less equipment, less space, and reduced consumption of electricity. A major advantage associated with virtualization is that data can reside across a shared pool of storage devices, but the devices themselves don't have to be equal. Critical information that needs to be accessed frequently can be sent to high-performance storage - the equipment with the fastest response times - while less important data can go to lower cost devices with slower response time. Data that is rarely accessed or needed only in emergencies can be stored on devices that are less advanced and less costly.
In 2013, IBM acquired SoftLayer Technologies and its global network of 13 data centers. In conjunction with IBM own data centers, this will make it easier to deliver software over a public cloud. IBM has continued making cloud computing acquisitions and expanded its global operations.
IBM opened data centers in Songdo International City, Incheon, South Korea, Auckland, New Zealand and Raleigh, North Carolina as part of a program to upgrade and expand its global network of data centers. This upgrade cycle is being driven by a growing shift by organizational enterprise to cloud computing. The trend is clear; data center operators are concerned about the amount of electricity it takes to run computers and keep them cool. Firms increasingly are interested in moving computing tasks to data centers operated by cloud computing providers. IBM opened a research laboratory in Hong Kong to develop collaboration technology for cloud computing applications. It is an extension of IBM's China Development Laboratory. IBM built a cloud data center in London, United Kingdom as part of a $1.2 billion global investment that includes opening 15 new cloud data centers worldwide. The London facility is based on IBM SoftLayer cloud architecture, which the company views as being central to addressing customers demands for more secure, reliable, and responsive cloud environments. These moves will allow the company to offer locally-based cloud facilities to customers in global financial centers.
IBM has been expanding the capabilities in global markets with increased resiliency, networking, scaling and data privacy controls. There are IBM Cloud availability zones with added capacity and capability in: Europe - Germany and United Kingdom, Asia-Pacific - Tokyo and Sydney, and North America - Washington, DC and Dallas, Texas. An availability zone is an isolated instance of cloud inside a data center region, with independent power, cooling and networking to strengthen fault tolerance. There is global availability with multi-zone clusters. Within the same IBM Cloud region, clients can deploy a Kubernetes cluster with worker nodes distributed across different zones in multiple physical data centers. This ensures that apps and clusters remain highly available. Kubernetes clusters apply worker pools comprised of worker node collections which define the number of app instances and ensure distribution across zones.
IBM is a member of OASIS: Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. It has been supporting initiatives to standardize the management of cloud applications and services. TOSCA: Topology and Orchestration Specification for the Cloud enables portable deployment across clouds, and simplifies workload migration of existing applications to the cloud. It decouples the cloud service provider from a provider or hosting technology. This allows organizations deploying a cloud to compose once and then deploy to a cloud environment.
On May 25, 2018, the European Union GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation superseded the UK Data Protection Act 1998. GDPR compliance requires policies and procedures to deal with the transparency, accountability and individuals' rights provisions. There are significant penalties for non compliance. IBM Cloud Internet Services are being developed for as a tool for adherence to regulatory compliance requirements.
IBM is developing a VPC: Virtual Private Cloud service to provide isolation for workloads and data on the IBM Cloud. It will provide control over the virtual networking environment and includes the option for clients to BYOIP: Bring Your Own IP addresses. The goal is to secure workloads from network intrusion, isolate workloads from other accounts and distribute application workloads across availability zones. Clients will be able to create an isolated cloud environment spanning multiple regions and connected to their on-premises environments. IBM Cloud Internet Services will help clients protect internet-facing applications from DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service attacks, data theft and bot attacks.
IBM is making disparate cloud environments open to workload and application migrations. Instead of a proprietary version of OpenStack, IBM has been envisioning the open-source technology as a cloud standard. Its SmartCloud Foundation provides management, security, and orchestration to OpenStack development. The plan is to create an HTTP-like standardization of cloud management. IBM will allow workloads to be used from different OpenStack providers. The IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator bundles OpenStack with commercial public cloud capabilities and components to launch a private cloud or establish a dedicated hosted infrastructure.
IBM has invested both in OpenStack - infrastructure as a service and Cloud Foundry platform as service projects. IBM Bluemix delivers software as composable services within a platform as a service. Bluemix is built on open source Cloud Foundry. New apps can be started by composing pre-integrated services into applications; the goal is accelerated development cycles. The Bluemix initiative provides software development tools and incentives for attracting outside programmers to make cloud applications for corporations. IBM strategic acquisitions include Cloudant and Compose. Cloud computing is an avenue of innovation for the IBM client base. IBM is promoting business intelligence software that analyzes data for patterns of customer behavior and market trends. IBM z Systems are being used with hybrid clouds. The assumption is that IBM will continue making available to developers its suites of software as a service-based business applications with composable API-based service.
Sources:
TechTarget - https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Whats-the-difference-between-Type-1-and-Type-2-hypervisors
Blog and third party reporting of IBM executives.
Erich Clementi, senior vice-president of IBM Global Technology Services
Faiyaz Shahpurwala, General Manager, IBM Cloud
