Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 6.4. The kernel level is now kernel-2.6.32-358.el6, for the main bug fixes see the kernel update description.

As usual there are the release notes and the technical notes in two separate documents. For System z besides the usual preventive bug fixes also some interesting features have been made available:

• FCP end-to-end data checking 
• s390utils enhancements
• Storage Class Memory aka Flash Express support
• Support for the Transactional-Execution Facility in zEC12
• Crypto Express 4S (CEX4S) adapter card support in z90crypt 
• libica enhancements  
• improved compression performance for zlib. Details can be found here. 
• ...

The IBM documentation for RHEL 6.4 for System z is on developerworks.

Whitepapers for Live Guest Relocation and z/VM 6.2

(updated 9/2/2013)

The Platform Test team for System z has published two new white papers that should help readers to get a smooth start with Live Guest Relocation in z/VM 6.2.

• Early Experiences with z/VM 6.2 and Live Guest Relocation: moving from CSE to SSI:  This paper describes the installation differences to a classical z/VM installation as experienced by the test team. It's not replacing the product documentation but rather augmenting it.
• z/VM Single System Image Cluster Live Guest Relocation with HiperSockets: Exploitation via Dynamic Routing: Live Guest Relocation and HiperSockets look like a contradiction at the first glance. If you move a z/VM  guest off the CEC - what do you do with this network interface? This paper offers a clever approach to this problem, while keeping the solution as flexible as possible. 
• z/VM Migration: Migrating the User Directory and RACF Environment: This document describes an automated migration to a new SSI environment using REXX scripts.

Performance results are available here:

• z/VM 6.2 Live Guest Relocation with Linux Middleware: This paper looks at a Java application and the impact and performance for moving it in various scenarios. It also gives recommendations on how to best set up z/VM for Live Guest Relocation
• z/VM 6.2 Live Guest Relocation with Linux Middleware - Various Workloads: This is the follow on paper to the one above with additional workloads and more in depth analysis. Besides looking deeper at Java it also uses a OLTP database workload and a file system workload for comparison and analysis.
• The z/VM performance update (starting at page 16) at SHARE contains quite some performance results for LGR.

There are also two Redbooks published:

• An Introduction to z/VM Single System Image (SSI) and Live Guest Relocation (LGR): This really is an introduction to the new z/VM functionality
• Using z/VM v 6.2 Single System Image (SSI) and Live Guest Relocation (LGR): This book is a little bit more advanced with concrete examples of moving e.g. an Websphere and a DB2 guest under load.

Even though the official term for mobility is "Live Guest Relocation" you might find also references to "Live Guest Mobility" or "Dynamic Relocation" or just "Mobility in z/VM".

Oracle 11 now certified for RHEL 6 on System z

After a long period of testing last week Oracle finally certified Oracle DB 11gR2 (11.2.0.3) running on RHEL 6.2 and later releases. For details see this Flash on TechDocs.With that all current distributions (RHEL5/6, SLES10/11) for Linux on System z are certified.
There also has been a webcast covering this hosted by the zSeries Oracle Special Interest Group.

z/VM 6.3 preview

Today IBM announced a preview of z/VM 6.3. The two top improvements are:

• 1 TB memory 
• HiperDispatch

At SHARE there have been two presentations with more technical details in it:

• z/VM performance update (starting at page 57) 
• z/VM Platform update (starting at page 44)