1. Updated Quickstart Policy
2. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2003, No. 2
1. Updated Quickstart Policy
We’ve recently updated Cheryl Watson’s Quickstart Policy on our Web site. This downloadable service policy has been used in hundreds of installations as an easy way to move into WLM goal mode. There are still installations that haven’t made the move, so we felt we should update the policy. The new policy will work only for installations running OS/390 R10 or z/OS. You can find it at www.watsonwalker.com/qsp.html. If you previously installed the policy and are running in goal mode, please review our changes. Many were made based on feedback from you. Here are the changes:
- Changed the STC classification rules to use a default of STCLO instead of SYSSTC by using the SPM rules.
- Added a new service class, NEWWORKV, for new work that requires a velocity goal instead of a response goal. Changed some new workloads to use NEWWORKV instead of NEWWORK.
- Updated the description of CICS and IMS subsystems to recommend using response time goals initially.
- Assigned transaction versus region management for production online systems, but still retained region management for test and older online systems.
- Enabled the I/O Priority Management option.
- Set the Dynamic Alias Management service option to NO (the default).
- Added a PRDBATMD service class for medium-priority batch work.
- Changed some velocities (PRDBATHI) so that a velocity of 30% would always have higher priority than discretionary work.
- Added new workloads for MQSeries (MQ), NetView (NETV), Oracle (ODSI), SAP R/3 (SAP) and WebSphere (CB).
- Changed all report class names to begin with ‘R’. Added report classes to every service class.
- Changed service class names ONLPRDLO and ONLPRDHI to TRANLO and TRANHI. There was too much similarity to the region managed service classes of ONLPRD and ONLTST, causing confusion. Added classification groups for these.
- Added description fields to classification rules and groups.
- Revised the contents of many of the classification group contents.
- Updated some of the documentation to provide more thorough explanations.
2. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2003, No. 2
The sixty-two-page 2003, No. 2 TUNING Letter was emailed to electronic subscribers on April 10. The print issues will be mailed next week. You can purchase a printed copy of the current TUNING Letter for $95 at http://www.watsonwalker.com. The following highlights some of what you can find in our latest TUNING Letter.
Support Dates
The most important management issue in this newsletter concerns the end-of-service (EOS) dates for operating system releases. To summarize: OS/390 R10 is officially supported only until September 2004, and most installations are currently running this release. That leaves 18 months to complete your migration. It’s important to start that migration soon so that you aren’t the last people trying to convert. Although some people are holding out, hoping that IBM will extend the EOS date, we think it’s ill-advised to do that. The major problem to solve is the older hardware that is no longer supported by z/OS. This includes all of the 9672s prior to the G5/G6 models (i.e. 9672-xx6 and 9672-xx7 can support z/OS, but not other models). Many people assume that they can’t upgrade due to budget cuts in this economy. But it’s worth the effort to review the actual cost. Maintenance costs on many of the older machines can be higher than upgrading to a newer model. See our recommendations on page 12 and page 58.
Our SHARE Trip Report
In this section we describe the most interesting items that we found at SHARE. For the first time, SHARE is publishing their proceedings in the members-only section of their Web site, so our notes will be even more important to non-SHARE members. But consider joining SHARE. It’s $500 one time for your organization (see page 12). Our 24-page SHARE trip report contains recommended APARs, new facilities on z/OS, GRS notes and updates on JES2, z/OS UNIX, DFSMShsm, Language Environment and Java on z/OS.
Elsewhere in The Issue
You’ll find WLM updates starting on page 8. These include our new Quickstart Policy, techniques for managing Oracle with WLM and a preview of the future of WLM on multiple platforms. Our update on Parallel Sysplex can be found starting on page 40 and includes discussions of System-Managed CF Structure Duplexing and Transactional VSAM (TVS). Our User Experiences (page 45) continues to be a popular section. In this issue we cover how to solve end-of-line problems when editing UNIX-originated text files. We also cover sorts in z/Architecture mode and other z/Architecture issues. Bob Archambeault provides an overview of the next phase of CICS processing – the Open Transaction Environment (OTE), starting on page 50. Our What’s New section (page 36) highlights an upcoming release of WebSphere on z/OS and a free z/OS and sysplex health checker from IBM.
Stay tuned!