Hardware

The hardware components of the test environment consist of a host system, a storage server, and a client system server.

Host system

The host system was an IBM® zEnterprise® 196 (z196), Model 2817-M66.

On that system, an LPAR was configured with processor and memory resources, as outlined in Table 1.

Table 1. LPAR processor and memory configuration
Resource	Initial	Reserved
Shared processors (CPs)	8	20
Memory	48 GiB	464 GiB

The use of shared processors was chosen because this is the typical configuration for customer environments, and because the vertical dispatch mode of the new z/VM HiperDispatch feature is only supported for shared processors. In order to ensure reproducible test conditions, this LPAR was the only active LPAR on the host system.

Note: Shared IFLs (Integrated Facility for Linux type processors) could have been used as well.

Access to ECKD disk storage was provided by four FICON® Express8 8 Gbit channel cards that are connected to a FICON switch.

Access to SCSI disk storage was provided by four FICON Express8 8 Gbit channel cards that are connected to an FCP switch.

Storage server

The storage server was an IBM System Storage® DS8800, Model 951 with eight host adapters that were each connected to the same FICON and FCP switches as the host system.

All essential ECKD and SCSI disks were configured on that storage server.

Client system server

The client system server was an IBM® Flex System, Model 8737-R2G.

Table 2. Client system configuration
Resource	Initial
Processors (CPUs)	2 Intel Xeon processors E5-2690 operating at 2.9 GHz
Memory	250 GiB DDR3
Network connectivity	10 GbE network card