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Inclusion of Virtualization in an Introductory Mainframe Class

Inclusion of Virtualization in an Introductory Mainframe Class. Cameron Seay School of Business North Carolina Central University. North Carolina Central University:. Is a public liberal arts university with a science focus.

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Inclusion of Virtualization in an Introductory Mainframe Class

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  1. Inclusion of Virtualization in an Introductory Mainframe Class Cameron Seay School of Business North Carolina Central University

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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)

  5. 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

  6. 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.

  7. 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

  8. 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 They provided 20 guest machines (20!) on a system located in Poughkeepsie for the students to log in to. The result was a very doable 5-lecture, 6-lab module that covered the basics of z/VM and virtual Linux on z/VM

  9. 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

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

  11. 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!!!

  12. 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.

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