Thursday, April 12, 2018

White Paper: Exploiting HiperSockets in a KVM Environment Using IP Routing with Linux on Z

Our performance group has published a new white paper titled "Exploiting HiperSockets in a KVM Environment Using IP Routing with Linux on Z".
Abstract:
"The IBM Z platforms provide the HiperSockets technology feature for high-speed communications. This paper documents how to set up and configure KVM virtual machines to use HiperSockets with IP routing capabilities of the TCP/IP stack.
It provides a Network Performance comparison between various network configurations and illustrates how HiperSockets can achieve greater performance for many workload types, across a wide range of data-flow patterns, compared with using an OSA 10GbE card.
"
This white paper is available as .pdf and .html.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

RHEL 7.5 with support for KVM on Z available

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is out. From the release notes, available here:
Availability across multiple architectures
To further support customer choice in computing architecture, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is simultaneously available across all supported architectures, including x86, IBM Power, IBM z Systems, and 64-bit Arm.
Support for IBM Z is available through the kernel-alt package, as indicated earlier here, which provides Linux kernel 4.14. QEMU ships v2.10 via package qemu-kvm-ma, and libvirt is updated to v3.9.0 for all platforms.
Thereby, all IBM z14 features as previously listed here are available.
Check these instructions on how to get started.