Initial Evaluation of the Hercules Mainframe Emulation Software

By Tom Lehmann, Lehmann Corporation

The purpose of this exercise was to do an initial evaluation of the Hercules mainframe emulator on current 64 bit Intel based hardware. The package is currently running on a variety of 32 and 64 bit hardware, but no formal evaluation of the package has ever been performed. The Hercules software appears to be a viable emulation of a wide range of recent IBM mainframes up to and including the z-series. While it doesn’t emulate every feature of the IBM hardware, it does cover the bulk of the platform and appears to support the guest operating system successfully. (Since IBM’s z/OS is not legally available, testing was done on SuSE 390x 64 bit Linux.)

The performance of the package varies with the underlying hardware. It appears to scale linearly with clock rate and with the number of physical cores available to the emulator.

Installation of the package on 64 bit hardware over a Windows and a Linux base operating system was relatively straightforward but required many steps (which could be scripted) and a significant amount of time.

The one week length of the evaluation precluded any long term stability testing. No failures of any sort were encountered during the testing, but the bulk of the code executed was single threaded so it did not really stress the emulator significantly.

In summary, the package appears to be a viable candidate for many mainframe environments. However, it would be prudent to perform some long term testing before employing the package in a development or production capacity.

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