z/VM 6.3 - Virtualization with efficiency at scale

On July 23 we also saw the announcement of z/VM 6.3 : 'IBM z/VM V6.3 - Virtualization with efficiency at scale (ZP13-0376)'.

At a glance (straight from the announcement) :

• Improved economies of scale with z/VM support for 1 TB of real memory.
  • Better performance for larger virtual machines.
    • Quadruples memory scalability while continuing to maintain greater than 90% resource utilization.
  • Additional vertical scalability to help reduce logical partition (LPAR) sprawl.
    • Considerably more virtual machines can be consolidated into a single LPAR, depending on workload characteristics.
  • Reduced administrative expense through managing a smaller number of large-capacity z/VM host servers.
• Improved performance with HiperDispatch.
  • More efficient utilization of CPU hardware resources for dispatched work.
• Adoption of OpenStack as part of the IBM cloud strategy. In concert, IBM is making contributions to the OpenStack project that are designed to enable z/VM V6.3 to be the first System z® operating environment to be managed by these open cloud architecture-based interfaces.
• Simplified migration to z/VM V6.3 with upgrade in place, which reduces the effect of an upgrade on active workloads.
• Highly secure industry-standard support that is required for banking and financial-industry applications.
• Support for the new IBM zEC12 and zBC12 servers.

The program number is 5741-A07.

Hardware requirements are stricter than for z/OS 2.1 as I only see z10 BC, z10 EC, z196, z114 and the recent zEC12 and zBC12.

There's an excellent web page with information and links about ordering and availability, service and support, reference information and online documentation and publications. You can find it over here.