Hi
I am new to this group.
Let me please provide a bit of background why I am making this post.
At my first IT job in 1999 there was an IBM 9221 running VM/ESA and on
top of that VSE/ESA. My involvement with that machine was
(unfortunately) very sporadic, I had to look after other tech.
I got very basic training on the machine, enabling me to do some simple
things ('v net, act' and stuff like that). Unfortunately I forgot most
of what I knew back then over the last 25 years due to not being
involved with mainframes professionally.
While I do play with mainframe tech in my spare time a bit, I cannot
claim any in-depth knowledge.
One thing that was explained to me back then was very impressive to me
and stuck in my mind.
You can install VM on top of VM
My knee-jerk question to my instructor back then was:
How deep can you go?
He didn't know.
Ever since, I have an idea in my head that comes back occasionally.
Can you install VM 'recursively'?
What I mean by that is the following:
Can you prepare an IPL-able VM tape that does the following:
* IPL (obviously)
* without user interaction:
* Some arithmetic to assess suitable values for the next step like
available memory (storage) and available DASD space
* create the necessary infrastructure to run a VM guest
(user account, minidisk, etc.) with the pre-computed values from the
last step
* IPL the same tape that was used originally for the 'bare-metal'
installation inside the just created VM
* Configure the guest system so that it can be reached from the
outside via a 3270 session or some such
This process is supposed to run as unattended as possible, continuing
until some inherent nesting limitation of VM is reached or a required
resource like storage or DASD space is exhausted.
I am lacking the experience with VM to assess whether this is possible
at all or if perhaps it is possible in principle but only with later
versions of VM than VM/370 or something like that.
Anyways, I would be interested in the opinion of people on this mailing
list regarding this topic.
Perhaps you'll tell me this is a stupid idea, but hey ho.
-Alex
