Author Description

This book was written by IBM® IT specialists who have experience implementing IBM Z® solutions, especially Linux on IBM LinuxONETM (LinuxONE) or IBM Z servers. Therefore, the content of this book follows the guidelines from Linux and IBM z/VM® regarding LinuxONE and IBM Z installations. The preferred practices described in this book are gathered from the experiences of those specialists in hundreds of projects at IBM and customer environments. This publication provides you with all of the information that you need to decide the best scaling architecture when implementing Linux on IBM Z or LinuxONE. This book has the following goals: To inform you about x86 sprawl problems To inform you that x86 Vertical Scale out architectures are problematic going forward To provide solutions to x86 server sprawl problems To inform you about the LinuxONE and IBM Z differentiation for each x86 server sprawl problem To provide virtulization and security options for LinuxOne and IBM Z The scaling up and scaling out architectures enable you to scale the capacity of an existing system to attend a sporadic application demand or an application workload. This gives you some freedom to operate in the environment. However, if this activity is performed without correct planning and the correct architecture choice, it leads to a server sprawl situation where your environment houses more servers than it should based on its current and predicted requirements. Although scaling out on x86 systems is a common form of scaling because of their popularity, the x86 systems were originally designed as cheap computers. Unfortunately, the scale out on x86 can easily become a problem in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO) when the environment starts to increase in terms of number of physical servers. The LinuxONE and IBM Z servers solve the sprawl problem caused by the scaling out of x86 servers, and are an excellent choice for