One of the primary operating systems for the z13 is Linux which can run in a variety of different modes on the new mainframe. Birtles explains that the z13 comes with LPAR logical partitions and the Prism which is the built-in hypervisor. The z/VM technology runs in a machine defined partition and then a guest Linux operating system can be run on top.
“Some in our Linux community choose to run just with the available machine partitioning,” Birtles said. “Many will choose to run with z/VM, which can provide more granularity in terms of individual virtual machines and more over commitment of resources in the memory space than you can get from hardware partitioning.”