On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS

The On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS component of IBM Test Accelerator for Z enables enterprises to host z/OS using virtualized or emulated IBM® Z hardware on Linux running on x86-64 or s390x machines, supporting mainframe application demonstration, development, testing, and education use cases. The On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS tooling provides an API or UI web-based interface to create and manage images and allowing self-service capabilities to provision z/OS instances on Linux target environments.

On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS provides the following features:

An application development and testing environment that can improve development infrastructure availability and flexibility.
Current® levels of IBM® z/OS® software that give access to new runtime capabilities for development and testing for enterprises.
Mixed workload support for enterprises, which can help reduce the development costs.
An approachable and portable environment for education on Z for enterprises.
A web-based interface to extract and manage images as well as self-service provision instances from these images.
Creating and managing images from various sources.
Provisioning images for developers and testers in a self-service automated way.
Monitoring the status and availability of all created assets and target environments.

Source environments

A source environment is a z/OS environment that you want to extract and use on emulated or virtualized hardware with the On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS. The methods to retrieve this data are either: can work with your source environments to extract, provision and deploy the necessary volumes or data sets that are required to target environments.

Extract: Supports component creation by extracting, compressing, and transferring artifacts from an existing z/OS environment.
Copy: Supports faster volume component creation by compressing and transferring an existing z/OS instance that runs on a ZD&T, ZVDT, or On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS.

You can specify and configure source environments on the web server. For more information, see Adding source environments.

z/OS Extraction Utilities

The z/OS Extraction Utilities are required to be installed on your z/OS source environments that you want to extract. For more information, see Optional: Installing z/OS Extraction Utilities.

Target environments

A target environment is a destinations where virtualized z/OS instances can be provisioned or images can be deployed. The different types are:

Wazi as a Service: This provides support for being able to deploy an extracted image to a Wazi as a Service within IBM Cloud. Provisioning of an instance from these images is done within the IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud interface.

Linux: This provides support for being able to provision z/OS instances on a Linux system that runs on x86-64 or s390x hardware.

Web server

The web server provides role-based UI and API solutions for enabling component and image creation from source environments, and provisioning z/OS instances based on the created images to target environments.

The web server provides the following features:

Integrating with company LDAP account to enable administrators to set up accounts with minimum efforts.
Scheduling the extraction or provisioning for another date or time that you want.
Flexible functions to select required data sets or volumes from the source machine, and transfer the data sets or volumes to the target machine.
Providing REST API support, which enables you to integrate and automate the functions of the web server in your own environment.

For more information, see Setting up the web server.

Storage server

On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS stores extracted information on the intermediary storage machine, for example, SFTP server. Extracted information is never deleted from the storage server until the information is manually deleted, which enables you to provision as many machines as you want based on your license entitlement. You need to prepare such a storage server and ensure enough storage on the storage server to hold the required artifacts.

License server

The license server provides a centralized management of licenses for one or more z/OS instances using On-demand Development and Test Environment for z/OS. A license is not required to run the web server functionality.

Each license key file is generated within the IBM License Key Center and when applied to your license server it will entitled a number of emulated or virtualized IBM Z central processors (CP) to be activated. Each general purpose central processor requires 1 license to activate. A single z/OS instance requires a minimum of 1 central processor and a maximum of either 8, on x86-64 Linux target environments or 16, on s390x Linux target environments.

The following topologies describe the software-based license server and various components of On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS.

For more information, see Setting up the software-based license server.

Note: The web server, storage server, and license server can be configured on the same machine. If you want to use one machine, you need to have large storage on the machine.