Should I run MQ for Linux, on z/OS on my Linux?

Yes – this sounds crazy.  Let me break it down.

1. zPDT is a product from IBM that allows me to run system 390 application on my laptop.  I am running z/OS 2.4, and MQ 9.1.3.   For normal editing and running MQ – it feels as fast as when I had my own real hardware at IBM.
2. z/OS 2.4 can run docker images in a special z/OS address space called zCX.
3. I can run MQ distributed in docker.

Stringing these together I can run MQ distributed in a docker environment. The docked environment runs on z/OS.    The z/OS runs runs on my laptop!  To learn more about running this scenario on real z/OS hardware… 

• Matt Lemming has a blog post called Use cases for MQ in z/OS Container Extensions. 
• Tony Sharkey has written a document (MQ for z/OS Performance Report -Use cases with z/OS Container Extensions)  about his measurements and the costs of running the scenarios that Matt describes.

20 years ago, someone was enthusiastically telling me how you could partition distributed servers using a product called VMWare.    They kept saying how good it was, and asking why wasn’t I excited about it.  I said that when I joined IBM – 20 years before the discussion (so 40 years ago), the development platform was multiple VS1 (an early MVS) running on VM/360.  Someone had VM/360 running under VM/360 with VS1 running on that!  Now that was impressive!

Now if only I could get z/OS to run in docker….