What are HCM and HCD?

HCM and HCD are programs that work together to help you create and manage the hardware and software aspects of your z/VM system.

HCM runs on a Windows-based personal computer connected to the z/VM system via a TCP/IP network connection, and gives you a graphical user interface to help you configure your system. You provide the needed I/O configuration information to HCM, which processes the information and passes it to HCD.

HCD runs in a z/VM server virtual machine and performs the work of actually creating and changing the hardware and software aspects of your I/O configuration. While HCM provides the primary user interface to HCD, HCD also provides a back-up user interface on your z/VM host for certain I/O configuration tasks, in case HCM is not available.

HCM and HCD on z/VM can be used to create and manage both the hardware and software aspects of the I/O configuration for all servers and their logical partitions (LPARs). The resulting configuration repository containing all definitions (the IODF) can then be distributed to all systems or shared on a central disk. At that point, the IOCDSs are written locally and the SYSTEM CONFIG files must be updated.

Besides the necessary system-unique differences between HCD on z/VM and HCD on z/OS, HCD on z/VM does not provide the host-dialog user interface of HCD on z/OS. Rather, HCM is provided as the primary user interface to HCD on z/VM.

Note: The unit-information modules (UIMs) needed for z/OS software-configuration support are not in the z/VM version of HCD. Therefore, you cannot define a z/OS software configuration using HCD on z/VM. If you have a mixed environment with z/VM and z/OS systems on a single server, use HCD on a z/OS system as the central place for I/O configuration definition both for the hardware and for the z/VM and z/OS software definitions. You must then export the resulting production IODF to any other z/OS systems and to the z/VM systems for activation (or, alternatively, for some or all of the z/OS systems, you can share the IODF via shared disk).