2024 IBM TechXchange: Client Workshop North America for Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE

Join us for the Client Workshop North America for Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE on May 14-15 at the Innovation Studio in Dallas, Texas!

 Register on the event page here

 Dates and Times

• Start: Tuesday, May 14^th at 9:30 AM Eastern Time
• End: Wednesday, May 15^th at 5:30 PM Eastern Time

General Information 

• Get the latest news and technical information for Linux on IBM Z, LinuxONE, KVM, z/VM, Red Hat OpenShift, and Hybrid Cloud. Take the opportunity to interact directly with our IBM experts and join interactive workgroup sessions on these two days.
• Find the agenda on the event page.

Target Audience

• Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE Clients, Partners, Software Vendors, IBM Z Technical Sales

Topic Highlights

• LinuxONE technologies and capabilities
• What's New - Linux and KVM on IBM Z and LinuxONE
• What’s New on OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE 4.15
• z/VM Platform Update and z/VM Express System Installation update
• Quantum Safe on LinuxONE
• The best of both Worlds - Taking anvantage of Linux with z/OS
• IBM LinuxONE as Management and Automation Hub for your enterprise
• Security and Compliance uptade for IBM Z and LinuxONE
• RH OpenShift Multi-Architecture solution options
• DevSecOps on IBM Z with Red Hat Solutions
• Learn how to enable AI and put it to work for your mission critical workloads on IBM LinuxONE 4
• Cloud Paks Overview and Use Cases
• IT Economics session on the TCO and sustainability benefits of LinuxONE and Linux on Z

Location

• Innovation Studio Dallas
  1177 S. Belt Line Road
  Coppell, Texas 75019
  USA

Enrollment and Costs/Fees 

• You are responsible for your travel and accommodation expenses.

Contact

Stephanie Monisteri, gherghe@de.ibm.com

GitHub Actions now Supports IBM Z & LinuxONE!

Earlier this month, the Open Source Program Office for IBM Z and LinuxONE announced plans to make hosted GitHub Action runners available free of charge to open source software communities. This is a collaboration with IBM Power and partner Sine Nomine Associates.

See here for the full announcement!

SAVE THE DATE: 2024 TechXchange: Client Workshop EMEA for Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE on April 9-10 in Germany

Get the latest news and technical information for Hybrid Cloud, as well as for Linux on IBM Z & LinuxONE, KVM, z/VM, and Red Hat OpenShift.
Interact directly with our IBM experts and join interactive work group sessions on these two days. 

Upcoming Client Webinars

Date: Wednesday, February 7^th 

• Time:  11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern Time
• Title: Memory optimization when running MongoDB on Linux on IBM Z
• Register here
• Description: MongoDB is a widely adapted NoSQL database, popular for storing structured and unstructured data. In the first part of this webcast, we present the performance impact by using different 'memory-to-database size' ratios for MongoDB running in an LPAR on IBM Z. In the second part, we will present results of the performance of different compression algorithms and how we can reduce the amount of the consumed disk space by MongoDB on IBM Z.
• Presenters
• Dominic Roehm, Chief Performance Architect for Linux on IBM Z
• Philipp Leutz, Software Engineer, Linux on IBM Z Performance

 

Date: Wednesday, February 28^th

• Time:  11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern Time
• Title:  Using IBM Instana for enhanced visibility into hybrid applications on the Mainframe
• Register here
• Description: Business success depends on detecting application performance issues in mobile, cloud, or on-prem environments before customers are impacted. Yet many struggle to integrate IBM Z resources into their enterprise-wide observability solutions. In this session, we will demonstrate how IBM Instana can be deployed as comprehensive observability solution either in the cloud or self-hosted on Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE. We will also demonstrate the technical capabilities to provide complete transactional visibility from distributed applications to IBM Z, including z/OS. This enhanced visibility ensures that SREs can swiftly identify the context of application latency, and engage the correct mainframe SMEs quickly for in-depth troubleshooting.
• Presenters
• Ruediger Schulze, STSM, Observability and OpenTelemetry for IBM Z and LinuxONE
• Christopher Walker, Principal Product Manager - IBM Z AIOps portfolio
• Srirama Sharma, Technical Architect, OpenShift - Cloud Paks on IBM Z

Howto: Configuring your Linux LPAR for Secure Boot

Secure Boot is a feature of a system bootloader that is intended to restrict a system to only boot trustworthy operating systems. In the case of Linux this means the Linux kernel must be signed by a trusted party (e.g., a distributor) of which the certificates to verify the kernel are installed in the system. Once securely booted, a Linux kernel runs in lock-down mode which means that only signed modules can be loaded and certain “dangerous” kernel functions are disabled.

Since May 2023, IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4 servers have extended support for Secure Boot: operators now have the option to securely boot Linux into a logical partition from SCSI, NVMe and ECKD devices. In addition, a system operator can configure for each logical partition which certificates shall be used to verify a signed Linux kernel upon secure boot.

This can be done on the Hardware Management Console (HMC) with the HMC “Secure Boot Certificate Management” task.

Once secure boot certificates are configured for a logical partition, the initial (RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu) certificates baked into the system firmware will no longer be used by the secure boot process.

There are many advantages to the configurability of secure boot certificates. Among others, this feature allows operators

• to react to secure boot certificate revocation according to the policies of their company (i.e., without being forced to wait for a new firmware update),

• restrict the securely bootable kernels to specific Linux distributors, and

• to configure the system to securely boot Linux with kernels signed by the customer or a trusted vendor of the customer’s choice.

Operators who want to configure logical partitions with certificates of their own choice (e.g., with a new certificate after a Linux distributor has revoked its previous certificate) must fetch the according certificates from the distributors:

• RHEL: Use the certificate labeled "Red Hat Secureboot 302" with Subject Common Name "Red Hat Secure Boot (signing key 2)" at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/key

• SLES: "SUSE Secure Boot Signing Key" at https://www.suse.com/support/security/keys/

• Ubuntu: File sipl.x509 at http://us.ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/<first_part _of_release_codename>/main/signed/linux-s390x/current/signed.tar.gz (e.g. Jammy for Ubuntu 22.04)

The operator then must verify the validity of the fetched certificates (e.g . using openSSL tools), upload the certificates to the HMC, and assign them to the target logical partition.

For an in depth documentation of Secure Boot for IBM Z and LinuxONE see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/linux-on-systems?topic=security-secure-boot-linux-onibm-z-linuxone.

Howto: How to set up IBM Event Streams with MongoDB on IBM Z and LinuxONE

We have published new documentations on how to set up IBM Event Streams by using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, including a real-time scenario on how to transfer data between two databases (MongoDB) using Kafka Connect and Connectors.
In addition, it also explains the MongoDB setup on the Red Hat OpenShift environment, using Helm Chart for POC purposes. 

Go here for the full document.

New Release: qclib v2.4.1

qclib v2.4.1 is now available for download here. This is a bugfix release.

For more information, see the README.