With the volte-face that sees DOS/VSE suddenly assuming near equal billing with VM on the 9370, VM aficionados impatient to see their favourite operation enjoy its place in the IBM sun must be wondering what they have done to deserve the treatment they get from IBM. At the same time as IBM was announcing that IMS 2.2 (see alongside) would be the last MVS/XA release of the database system and that future ones would be for MVS/ESA, the company announced that the first full XA release of VM would finally become available this Friday, April 29. That release is of course VM/SP 1.0, proudly described as IBM’s premier VM operating system for 370-XA processors. It supersedes all releases of VM/XA Systems Facility, giving High Performance Option customers an attractive growth path to IBM’s larger processors running in single-image mode. The multiple preferred guests capability will be supported on IBM 3090 E models with Processor Resource/Systems Manager – PR/SM installed – well that’s something. But at this rate, ESA will become obsolete just as the first full ESA release of VM becomes available to its long-suffering fans.
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