One question: Why?
IBM has bombarded the IT world for years now how they can consolidate hundreds to thousands of Linux VMs onto a single mainframe.
IBM has recently announced a partnership with Red hat to use KVM in a cloud offering. At first I thought, well maybe they are doing it to offer Microsoft applications as well, but that doesn’t appear to be the case:
Programmers who use the IBM Cloud for test and dev will be given RHEV to play with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server images with a Java layer as they code their apps and run them through regression and other tests.
Let’s see, Linux and Java, why not use the mainframes to do this? Why KVM? As far as the end users are concerned it really shouldn’t matter, after all it’s java and linux.
Seems like a slap in the face to their mainframe division (I never bought into the mainframe/linux/VM marketing myself, I suppose they don’t either). I do remember briefly having access to a S390 running a SuSE VM about 10 years ago, it was..interesting.