VSE

Short title to draw your attention to an operating system that knows a lot of prejudices and doesn't always get the attention it deserves : VSE. There was a conference last week on VSE at the Brussels IBM forum on zVSE V4 and the new MWLC pricing. There was also a nice customer testimony of Securex, a Belgian company that migrated DB2 from VSE to zLinux. Sure there were some pitfalls along the way but eventually they are very happy with the result. The event surely proved two things : there was a lot of attention from the VSE customers who you don't have to convince of the reliability of their systems. And they are very interested on how VSE can interact with new technology, SOA etc. That's why IBM is, on the other hand, is giving a very clear message that it's still putting a lot of effort into the VSE system to keep up with the 'modern world'. The two speakers were Wilhelm Mild and Klaus Goebel, who came over straight from the VSE center in Boeblingen. They brought a very convincing message talking about the modernization of VSE, the new pricing metrics and VSE in relation to SOA.
As a matter of fact, all these presentations can be found at the Documentation page of the IBM VSE web page.
This IBM VSE Web Page definitely deserves your attention. Just to give you an impression of how well VSE and existing (legacy) applications onVSE interact with e.g. DB2 on zLinux or with Web Services, take a look at this graphical representation of some VSE solutions :



You find lots of more info on these solutions over here.
Another interesting tab on the VSE site was mentioned : the downloads page. It contains lots of 'freeware' like e.g. the VSE health checker "a Java-based system diagnosis utility to retrieve, display, and analyze performance relevant data from a VSE system", all this "is transferred to the workstation, parsed, and displayed in the GUI for further analysis". Another workstation tool is the VSE Navigator : it "provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for the VSE operating system, which behaves very much like file managers that you know from other platforms, such as Windows (Explorer). The difference is, that it includes host based VSE file systems (VSE Librarian, POWER queues, ICCF, VSAM) and provides host specific functions, such as Generate and submit VSE jobs, Operator Console, List VTOC, Retrace products and PTFs, Display phases in the SVA, Display host CPU activity, and many more".

To conclude this VSE topic I would also like to draw you attention to an ongoing series of Live Virtual Classes on VSE. These webcasts are also done by people at Boeblingen, the very heart of VSE development. The first one's already been given : "z/VSE and MWLC Announcement Overview". You can download the presentation over here. The next presentation is on February 22 about "Midrange Workload Licensing Charges for z/VSE". You can subscribe over here. The last one is on March 15 about "z/VSE 4.1 solutions based on SOA and DB2". For this one you can subscribe over here.