Pete Clark on z/VSE: z/VSE Event Calendar 2010

by Pete Clark
December 8, 2009

We’re counting on 2010 to be another excellent year for z/VSE with notable deliverables in software, hardware, education events, and conferences. What follows is the z/VSE 2010 calendar and news from z/VSE Development.

April 9-13, 2010—WAVV: WAVV 2010 will be held at the Embassy Suites in Covington, KY, which is across the river from Cincinnati, OH. The agenda grid with session titles is available at www.wavv.org; abstracts will be posted as they’re completed. Take a look at the session grid for WAVV 2010; these great sessions and speakers are sure to entice you to attend.

April 30, 2010: z/VSE 4.1 will be withdrawn from service.

September 2010—WAVV 2011 planning: WAVV planning sessions are now conducted via Web conferencing in September and October, so be sure your WAVV committee person knows what session topics are important to you and is aware of your ideas to improve the WAVV experience. Go to www.wavv.org for contact information.

October 4-8, 2010—IBM System z Expo: This popular IBM U.S. technical conference will be held in Boston, MA. Knowledgeable presenters will provide excellent content on z/OS, z/VSE, z/VM, and Linux on System z. For more information, visit www.ibm.com.

Fourth Quarter 2010: z/VSE 4.3 will become available. CICS/ VSE won’t ship with this release. More information follows.

2010 Items In-Process

For z/VSE events that aren’t yet scheduled and up-to-date information on events, please visit www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zvse/events/.

The up-to-date schedule for Live Virtual Classes (LVCs) will be maintained on the z/VSE Website at www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zvse/education/#upcoming. Topic selection and session scheduling are currently in the planning stage. If you have suggestions, please send them to me, and I will forward them.

News From z/VSE Development

In October, IBM previewed z/VSE release 4.3, which includes new functionality to address growing workloads, ease-of-use, and other customer requirements. The following is additional detailed information regarding what’s planned for z/VSE 4.3.

Changes to z/VSE 4.3 are as transparent as possible for applications; users can easily migrate to z/VSE 4.3 and exploit the new functionality.

I/O control blocks and supervisor routines, together with VSAM and DL/I areas, will move above the 16MB line. As a result, 24-bit programs will be able to use the space that has been freed up. This will help keep more and larger programs and data in virtual storage and may help some installations consolidate z/VSE images.

z/VSE 4.3 will implement a major customer requirement— four-digit device addresses (cuu). During Initial Program Load (IPL), four-digit cuus are mapped to three-digit cuus. After IPL has completed, the z/VSE system then uses the three-digit cuu only. This implementation ensures your JCL and programs will run without modification. z/VSE 4.3 also provides commands and dialogs that can be used to manage the device address mappings. The four-digit cuu support simplifies the configuration planning, especially if running z/VSE with z/OS, Linux on System z, or z/VM.