IBM Z Virtualization with z86VM

Creating Virtual Machines in Minutes    

Large Scale and Secure computing at a fraction of the cost man1

How many computers are enough to meet your IT needs? Let’s start with one. The IBM Z server running z86VM is capable of hosting ten’s of thousands of x86 servers and virtual desktop images. These can be deployed using built in security and business resilience.

Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), Platform as a Service (PAAS), Desktop as a Service (DAAS) are just some of the possibilities when using z86VM to meet your computing needs.

Security

Keeping one virtual machine or application separate from another, is critical to the integrity of your business. z86VM delivers a solution based on workload compartmentalization.

smartphone Virtual Desktop

Desktop computers and mobile devices are dependent on their end users for data security and configuration management. Centralizing management and using stateless computing will reduce IT expense and risk.

Creating z86VM, a labor of love

z86VM originally started as an academic exercise, to see if one hardware architecture could emulate another. It was thought that it would be a great proof of concept for other software development, that Mantissa had in mind. But, something happened along the way.

A presentation was to be made at SHARE, the mainframe user group, in August 2009. It was intended to be a technology overview of what was possible to develop on the mainframe. Instead, due to an article written in Network World magazine,  our strategy changed and it became an operating environment and over time, it has evolved to two successful beta offerings hosting x86 Linux and our goal to make it satisfy Microsoft Windows operating systems as well.

Presently, z86VM is over 3 million lines of code that has been optimized to the IBM Z architecture to provide a high performance kernel for running x86 32-bit operating systems.