Running Linux on an S/390 or zSeries host

This section provides the information you need to run Linux on an S/390 or zSeries host.

There are three ways to run Linux on an S/390^® or zSeries^® host:

Native
Linux can run on the entire machine with no other operating system.
Logical Partition (LPAR)
You can logically partition the hardware into a maximum of 15 separate LPARs per logical channel subsystem. For example, you can have S/390 applications in one partition, VM and VSE applications in another partition, and Linux applications in another partition.
z/VM^® guest support
You can run Linux as a virtual machine using z/VM. VM provides virtualization of central processing units, I/O subsystems, and memory. You can have hundreds of Linux systems running on a single S/390 or zSeries host. For example, you can offer a complete Linux server environment to each of the application developers and host production systems all on the same S/390 or zSeries host.

For SUSE SLES 9 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, IBM^® supports 31- and 64-bit Linux for zSeries for a storage unit and FICON™, and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) attached host systems.

Note: You can attach a zSeries FCP host system running SUSE SLES 9 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 only through a switched-fabric configuration. You cannot attach the host through a direct configuration.