VM Workshop 2026

This presentation is a foundational deep dive into the ICIC architecture, exploring how it simplifies IaaS management for IBM z/VM and other hypervisors. Focus will be given to recent release cycles, specifically highlighting the high-impact enhancements introduced in the recent General Availability (GA) V1.2.5. Attendees will learn about improved scalability, security hardening, and revamped user interfaces.

Whether implementing hybrid cloud or supporting server consolidation projects, customers are implementing mission critical applications on Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE. In this session, the speakers will focus on real customer problems and associated solutions with managing this new infrastructure, including monitoring messages, monitoring spool space, sending alerts, feeding data to analytics platforms, automatically fixing a problem, and backing up and recovering critical data.

The z/VM virtual switch is a powerful option for connecting your virtual machines to an external network. We'll discuss various deployment options, including IEEE VLANs, link aggregation, global VSWITCHes with shared link aggregation port groups, the HiperSocket bridge, and the new support for the Network Express (OSH) adapter. We'll even spend some time talking about how to diagnose problems.

In my experiences with network teams, they seem to not understand how IBM z networking (specifically OSA hardware) works. Their reality of having a single physical wire carrying potentially over 100 IP addresses is beyond their "norm". Meanwhile, many IBM z SysProgs do not have mucn experience with TCP/IP (or VTAM, for that matter), which can impede working with the network team to solve connectivity issues. This presentation is a high-level review of TCP/IP v4 addressing and routing, along with common IBM z debugging tools that can be used to provide the networking team with connectivity data. The concepts and tools are common across all IBM Z operating systems, but I will touch on the implementation differences between z/VM, z/OS, VSEn and common Linux implementations.

Over the past couple of years I have worked on providing CMS with a SSH Server capability. I now have a working PoC that enables a full interactive SSH session or a 'one-shot' command mechanism. In addition, I have worked on providing CMS with a Python implementation (3.10+) which necessitated porting OpenSSL (1.1.1k and 3.6.0) in order to use pip3 to install packages from external repositories. Having Python means web-based tools are available including GUIs that enable tooling and applications to be built and run on CMS. Python is able to deal with files encoded in EBCDIC (IBM-1047) and ASCII (ISO8859-1) as I've developed an ASCII layer to multiple OpenExtension APIs. I am also working on a port of Perl 5.42.2 (the OpenSSL test suite uses Perl to automate its tests). This is in its early stages but I hope to have something to share during this session.