Linux on the Mainframe - Review by Matt Gates

I reviewed this book and found it to be well done. If you are intending to put Linux on a mainframe this book is worth obtaining and reading cover to cover. The authors are either current or former IBM.ers who I suspect are the best breed of people to write about this topic and resent a comprehensive overview. They get you thinking about the quality of your Linux on the Mainframe solution and its immense power.

The book presents the mainframe for people who have knowledge of Linux and Linux for the people who know the mainframe. Even if you know Linux and the mainframe it will remind you of how well they could fit together.

They cover the issues of virtualization using VM, security, communication between Linux instances, system availability, data management, performance and capacity planning, system administration deploying Linux servers, porting applications, and building an integrated server environment. By the way what I just went through is the table of contents chapter titles. They also describe LPARS (logical partitions) and VM (Virtual Machine). Just to whet your appetite you could run 15 Linux instances under LPAR only or around 10,000 instances under VM. Of course you need a big machine to run the 10,000.

There is also an 86 page reference of what the authors felt was good material to pass along as a separate section so as not to detract from the main chapters.

There are other parts that have a glossary and numerous references as well as a bibliography. A note here they refer to IBM Redbooks. These are publications that are written by people who use software and hardware and are extremely useful to people who will be the actual doers. I personally have used them for many years and testify that they give invaluable insight. They are generally available at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com and can be referred to there or downloaded.

The accuracy of the book is very good; I went cover to cover on this book and found a handful of insignificant errors.

As a mainframe system programmer of three decades I think they did a nice job of presenting the philosophy of what a mainframe is about. As a multi year Linux user I feel they presented how Linux would run on a mainframe;.perfect together. as we say in New Jersey.