Chapter 19. Building Integrated Server Environments

Servers often cooperate with other servers in an integrated environment. The foundation for this cooperation is server-to-server communication. In this chapter, we will show how the mainframe not only facilitates communication between the Linux images that run on it, but also provides additional benefits for such integrated environments.

A Linux image can use the mainframe's internal communication methods to communicate with other Linux images or with any traditional operating system images on the same machine. You can, therefore, build e-business environments with the latest Linux application as a middle-tier server and a traditional z/OS or VSE/ESA application as a back-end server.

In this chapter, we address these questions:

• What advantages does inter-image communication offer above the communication between discrete servers?

• How can Linux on the mainframe exploit existing z/OS or VSE/ESA resources?

• How can traditional mainframe operating systems exploit Linux resources?