On Tue, 11 Jun 2024 at 13:58, Jason Cai <[email protected]> wrote: > Our organization's z mainframe has reached the end of its hardware service > life and is no longer capable of running z/OS. However, we have a LinuxONE > machine that remains operational. > > We possess historical data backups from our z/OS environment that we need > to access. To address this, we are considering the installation of the > Hercules emulator on our zLinux environment. Our goal is to utilize > Hercules to emulate the z/OS necessary to access our backup data sometime. >
Hercules does not emulate *any *operating system. Hercules emulates *hardware *from the S/370 all the way to zArch family. You would need to run an operating system under Hercules, no matter what host platform (from Rasberry pi to Linux 1 and pretty much everything in between) Hercules is running on. Even if it might work, you can't run z/OS for this purpose for IBM licensing reasons. Could you please advise on the feasibility of this approach? Specifically, > we are interested in understanding: > > 1. The compatibility of Hercules with zLinux on a LinuxONE machine. > It should run, but probably hasn't been tested. 2. Any known limitations or considerations we should be aware of when using > Hercules for this purpose. > Many... > 3. The steps required to set up Hercules in a zLinux environment to access > z/OS backup data. > Again, you need an operating system, and presumably some application program(s) that understand the format of your backup data. What format is this historical data in? Backups on disk or (virtual?) tape? Made by what program? Or is the historical data as-it-was on physical disks that were attached to your former z/OS on an obsolete zArch machine and are now attached to your Linux 1 box? In that case, what kind of disks, and what kind of datasets? Depending on answers to the above, it is just faintly possible that you could run MVS 3.8 in this environment, and use its understanding of IBM disk geometry (limited 3390 support has been added by user mods) and access methods to read the data. But there is still the question of what application programs would read and interpret this data, whether they would work on an old 24-bit MVS, and whether they too would have licensing issues. Without further information I would guess that writing new code in a modern language to run directly under Linux on your Linux 1 machine and interpret your historical data would be the best approach. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
