Shell Commands › Utilities › vm2class: Appliance Distro Creation Utility for z/VM › vm2class Reference - Overview

vm2class Reference - Overview

The vm2class utility creates new OS distributions for CA AppLogic for System z® appliances. The utility creates the appliance class from a Linux OS installed on z/VM. This appliance is used as the basis for creating new appliance classes. The appliance class that is created can either be unmanaged or managed:

• An unmanaged appliance class does not contain any modifications to the volumes.
• A managed appliance class is modified during creation to use the CA AppLogic for System z® Appliance Kit (APK), which enhances the appliance with the following characteristics:
  • The appliance can define its own boundary:
    • Property settings that allow the customization of the appliance behavior and configuration
    • Terminals that are used to communicate with other appliances within the same application
    • Default interface that is used to access the appliance within the grid shell (ssh)
  • Appliance resource and performance counters can be collected and analyzed (CPU usage, memory usage, and so on).
  • Appliance lifecycle events are reported to CA AppLogic for System z® for the purposes of lifecycle management (tracking when the appliance has booted, appliance debugging, and so on).

Note: For information about how to create an appliance class from a Linux OS, see Solution User Guide.