Inclusion of Virtualization in an Introductory Mainframe Class

Cameron SeaySchool of Business

North Carolina Central University

North Carolina Central University:

Is a public liberal arts university with a science focus.

We were founded in 1910 to provide educational opportunities for the citizens of North Carolina, and that remains our mission to this day.

My Department (Computer Information Systems) is located in the School of Business

Our Program

General Educational Curriculum (GEC) – 40-50 Liberal Arts Courses

Common Body of Knowledge- 10-12 Business Courses

Major - 11 CIS Courses

Challenge: Making sure our students have a sufficient background in technology

Mainframe Program at NCCU

With the help of Marist and IBM, NCCU has established itself as part of the solution to the upcoming “skills crisis” in mainframe computing

With very little initial expertise in the area, we have been able to train over 70 students in this technology, with over 25 of them receiving mainframe placement to date.

Up until now this has been done solely with the intro class, but we have recently add two more courses to our curriculum (z/VM and Security)

Virtualization

For now well known reasons (server consolidation, lower headcount), virtualization is a hot topic in the IT industry today

But in our opinion, IBM z/VM OS is considerably underutilized as a strategic tool (especially in education)

Along with our work with z/OS (still our primary focus), we seek to expose a generation of high school students and undergraduates to z/VM technology

Why z/VM?

It has a track record of over 40 years, making it by far more mature than the other popular virtualization products

Can exploit the full depth of IBM’s System z technology (reliability, security, performance, scalability)

Is now a very stable environment for Linux, and therefore other open source solutions.

Because of it compatibility with Linux, it is an excellent platform for our students to learn that operating system, also.

HOW?????

As always, our issue is “where do we find or develop the expertise?”

Though we have extensive experience with x86 based virtualization, we had NONE with z/VM

While not as daunting as z/OS, z/VM is still nonetheless a sophisticated tool

IBM to the Rescue Again!

The IBM Academic Initiative elicited the help of System z production expertise in Poughkeepsie, NY to help NCCU develop a three-week module to insert into the intro to the mainframe course

A team of System z professionals, led by Eva Yan and Doug Trimboli of IBM, shared their extensive expertise in z/VM with us

The result was a very doable 5-lecture, 6-lab module that covered the basics of z/VM and virtual Linux on z/VM

They provided 20 guest machines (20!) on a system located in Poughkeepsie for the students to log in to.

The Modules:

Unit 1 – Overview, a description of virtualization in general and z/VM in particular

Unit 2 – z/VM Basics and the Control Program (CP)

Unit 3 – The Conversational Monitoring System (the z/VM OS

Unit 4 – the Linux Virtual Server

Unit 5- Workload (or, Doing Real Stuff!)

Day 6 was an open day to complete labs and reflect

The Labs

The labs ran parallel to the lectures- twice a week for 3 weeks

There was appx 1 hour 15 minutes for lecture, a break, and then an hour or so for lab

Eva Yan was present (at IBM expense) for all six sessions. Her presence was without question the main reason for our success.

The labs were a hit with the students from Day 1. They seemed to do very well on both CP and CMS, which can be a bit dry to beginners. The students seem to understand that both were needed to make the virtualizations run.

The Payoff!

Of course the highlight of the project were days 4, 5, and 6 where we installed virtual Linux, installed applications on it, and just had fun with it!

We installed VNC Viewer, Websphere, DB2, Apache, and a cloud application called eyeOS

To simply the workstation configuration, we installed all of the client software we needed on images that ran on NC State’s VCL Application

On the image we installed a 3270 client, a VPN client, and the VNC Viewer client.

THE STUDENTS HAD A BALL!!!

Afterthoughts…

Of course 12 hours is not enough time for a proper introduction to z/VM, but it’s all we had

Without IBM’s help (especially Eva Yan, who was great with the students) , this would have been impossible

It clearly demonstrated to the students the power and flexibility of z/VM and virtual Linux (most of the students had never touched Linus before)

In the class evaluation, the students without exception said there was not enough time for the material which to me is a good sign.