It was announced in December 2020 that Tessia, a tool that automates and simplifies the installation, configuration and testing of Linux systems running on the Z platform, officially joined the Open Mainframe Project ecosystem.
Tessia, an open source project for Z resource management and automated installation of Linux distribution, manages relationships between Z datacenter resources and allocates them to specific projects and users according to a role-based schema. Using these resources, Tessia can be included into existing pipelines and with pre-release distributions and drive faster release cycles and adoption of new technologies. Additionally, it enables developers to effortlessly bring up their environments or try out new releases before migration. In general, the mission of the new project improves experience with Linux on Z, which in turn facilitates faster adoption of open source on Z platform.
After a few short months with a vibrant open source community, Tessia is ready to announce its next code release. The release improves interaction with CPC (both DPM and classic modes) and z/VM guests.
This includes a general overhaul of communication with HMC and z/VM-specific tasks that tessia can perform.List of changes:
• Add z/VM transfer buffer size option [ link ]
• Do not fail poweron job on verification error [ link ]
• Switch off I/O device auto-configuration for SLES15.2 [ link ]
• Update kdump options in RHEL8 templates [ link ]
• Proceed with installation on ‘Base cpu cannot be detached’ [ link ]
• Fix broken long kernel command lines [ link ]
• Fix sending commands to HMC too early [ link ]
• Improve interaction with HMC [ link ]
Links to the release:
https://gitlab.com/tessia-project/tessia/-/tags/2.0.2
https://github.com/tessia-project/tessia/releases/tag/2.0.2
Tessia has been actively used by testers and developers in CI environments in IBM for Linux-related activites. For more information, watch this Tessia introductory video or review these Tessia slides from Open Mainframe Summit 2020. Or, join the conversation on Open Mainframe Project’s Slack Channel, #Tessia.
