If you've been keeping up with the recent z/OS 3.2 GA announcement, you've probably seen that we are serious about simplifying the care and feeding of the z/OS ecosystem. (Yes, this is an ecosystem effort, as the z/OS stack has many participants!)
I just came back from SHARE in Cleveland where there were several sessions on z/OS Simplification. Great conversations, and we loved hearing input on what we need to do. Feedback to make sure we are the right path is essential.
A huge part of z/OS Simplification has been trying to get control over configurations. The idea is that we can standardize their defintion, understand exactly what is in use on a system, be able to compare them between systems and between what could be a enterprise-standard or best practice, and many many other useful purposes.
The first part of this configuration simplification journey is for us to understand what configurations are in use today. We've had decades worth of system administrators tweaking settings, many of which are just "set it and forget it", which makes it hard for those coming after us to understand what is in place. Also, we suspect, several functions which have been introduced over the decades may not have been implemented.
With that in mind, we have started the "IBM Z Configuration Collection Program". This program is completely voluntunary, will help us understand how z/OS systems are configured today, and which settings are important to you.
To start the configuration collection process, please start here: https://ibm.biz/BdeKbQ. You'll be granted access to the website where you can retrieve the collection materials and see instructions on how to upload your files.
Here's some common questions you might have:
What will you collect? As of this writing, we will collect the following:
1. The contents of your parmlib members which were used for the current IPL. (If you dynamically changed any settings since the IPL, we will not collect those.)
2. The HCD IODF that you point us to.
3. The IMS configuration from your proclib data set (DFSPBxxx).
4. For Db2, we'll invoke the DSNTXAZP tool, for collecting input member configuration information.
Will there be more configuration information requested? Yes! We are starting out with what we see as the immediate configuration we most want to see. Additional configuration will be added, so please do come back and participate when you can. If you have suggestions for what configurations need simplifying, just let us know!
Can I redact any personal or confidential information that is generated by these configuration programs? Of course! We aren't interested in any personal or confidential information, and we will treat any submissions as confidential. If you wish to redact any information from what is generated, please do! We have no real interest in specific data set names, for instance. It's the configuration settings you are using which is of interest. If you want to even redact configuration settings which you deem undesirable to share - please do.
Why should you participate? Participation is your voice for what you need for your enterprise. Make your voice hear, so we can get a complete picture of what is in use in the marketplace. As an added bonus, we've heard that once you've collected this configuration information, it was interesting to see what was being used by the collectors!
Will IBM share the consolidated collection of this information? At this point, we've not yet decided how much we can share at a high level. We've heard that sharing is desired, so we'll see what we can do once we've collected a large amount of data.
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