Automating the Heck Out of Every LPAR – with Ansible

In today’s enterprise IT landscape, automation and operational efficiency have become a fundamental strategic imperative. At the GSUK conference, the PopUp Mainframe session entitled “Automate the Heck Out of Every LPAR” showcased how automation, particularly using Ansible, is transforming mainframe operations.

Here’s a summary of our discussion.

Why Automation Matters

At the heart of the story, the strategic value of automation sits across three pillars: operational efficiency, customer value, and innovation. For PopUp Mainframe, automation aims to enable scalable, repeatable processes that improve both our internal lab management and customer-facing features and services.

Ansible as the Automation Engine

We presented Ansible as the cornerstone of our automation strategy. It is quickly emerging as a de-facto industry standard to support automating mundane tasks. Its simplicity, powerful z/OS modules, and alignment with industry standards make it an ideal choice for a variety of use-cases. Additionally, Ansible’s marketplace and ease of learning have helped the PopUp Mainframe team quickly understand, devise, build, and deploy our own automation solutions.

Overcoming Technical Challenges

Of course, implementing new technology is never a totally flawless exercise, and adopting Ansible in the PopUp lab wasn’t without its own hurdles. The team encountered issues with VM inconsistencies, z/OS versioning, and password management. These challenges were met with a robust architecture that included GitHub integration, secrets management via IBM Cloud Secrets Manager, and a centralized Ansible control node. Establishing a more robust approach to Ansible implementation needed some thought, but in the end gave us the solid foundation we needed.

Architecture in Action: PopUp Playbooks

The architecture spans both virtual and physical mainframes. Ansible Playbook source code is stored in GitHub, provides playbooks which can be executed remotely against any z/OS environment, and secured with secrets management. This setup ensures flexibility and security while maintaining control over deployments.

The PopUp Mainframe product includes a broad range of Ansible playbooks to help users and product administrators simply and accelerate routine tasks. Our playbook library covers the following areas, all intended to streamline and simplify the administration of the PopUp virtualized z/OS environment –

  • z/OS health checks
  • Configuration and user management
  • Maintenance routines
  • Software installation

These examples illustrate how automation can handle routine tasks reliably and consistently, and are just the start of our journey. We are constantly adding new playbooks to the product, which we will continue to share with our customers.

Automation Outcomes

The team’s reflections on their journey underscored significant improvements: increased standardisation, documentation of expert knowledge in code, and notable gains in operational speed. These outcomes not only streamlined routine procedures but also laid the groundwork for ongoing innovation and efficiency across the mainframe environment.

Improved standardization, codified knowledge, and speed improvements were all tangible outcomes of our automation journey and, with the resulting Playbooks now provided with the product, we’re delighted to provide the same benefits to our customers.

Tips for Implementation

Reflecting on our own journey towards automation using Ansible, for teams looking to adopt the technology, we would offer the following practical advice:

  • Leverage the Ansible community. There is a wide variety of support out there if you know where to look, including monthly Ansible community guild calls, an active Discord channel, blogs, LinkedIn groups, forums, and more.
  • Get team buy-in early. We ran hands-on playbook sessions where all team members were invited to login and run some playbooks. They quickly realised how easy it was!
  • Define standards (for example using Ansible lint) and write clear README files – this is critical to ensure the playbooks can be run without specific technical knowledge which is key to democratising access to z/OS.

Additionally, determining the right way to measure that progress helps build a tangible aspect to the journey that you can record, report and use to justify further steps.

Looking Ahead

Strategically, the path of continuous operational improvements is never complete.  So, for our Ansible implementation, our future plans include:

  • Better tracking of playbook validation
  • Building additional custom playbooks for specific use cases
  • Making playbooks available to customers via AAP (Ansible Automation Platform)
  • Exploring event-driven automation

Here’s a previous article about the earlier steps in our Ansible journey. For more information on the PopUp Mainframe product, go here.

The Mainframe Delivery Revolution Continues

Last year, the PopUp Mainframe team was delighted to attend, present, and exhibit at the GSE UK Conference 2024 – the region’s biggest and best mainframe community event. Rubbing shoulders with industry luminaries, technical experts, household name organizations, it was a fantastic experience. And this year, with a fresh new title of GS UK 2025, the conference looks set to be one of the best ever – we look forward to attending another fantastic event!

Here’s a quick recap of why the PopUp Mainframe team value the conference so much.  

The need for speed – a mainframe market requirement

Mainframes remain the mainstay of enterprise computing. Industry reports (including our own from earlier this year) indicate continued reliance upon IBM mainframes across a variety of sectors, at some of the world’s largest and most successful organizations. Often part of a hybrid IT strategy nowadays, the IBM mainframe remains a central component of the organizational infrastructure, the applications it houses business critical in nature.

As important as it is, issues blight the mainframe environment, and none more so than the problem with bottlenecks (also reported in our survey). Mainframe delivery teams often suffer from the shortage of non-production environments for development, test, research, and training, impacting their ability to deliver as fast as the business would like.

Even with the advent of DevOps style tooling on the mainframe, the resource availability restrictions make genuine acceleration of delivery very tough.

Flexible mainframe delivery to match your imagination

We spoke last year of PopUp Mainframe’s breakthrough approach to providing readily-available, virtual mainframe environments to anyone who needs access, whenever they need it. PopUp Mainframe can figuratively pop-up in minutes to provide ready access for situations that demand it – scaling up test environment availability to run some resource-intensive or multi-user testing, to enable dev teams to collaborate on complex merges, to enable system administrators to validate fixes across different versions of the same sub-system, to offer ready access to new trainees before they ‘go live’ with their own LPAR access, to support an urgent application fix to commence while the usual LPAR is down for maintenance. The list goes on.

We were grateful for being invited to speak and for the lively discussion from the audience.

Increased PopUp Capability On Show

Since last year, we’ve released an updated product, widened the scope of our deployment offering to take in the IFL and LinuxONE, and we’ve added some key new capabilities to the product line.

And we’re pleased to return to the conference (now renamed GS UK) to widen the scope of our discussions based on these recent innovations. Join us to learn more about our latest innovations on Linux, with Ansible playbooks, with our new “FastTrack” facility, using mainframe open-source technology, and more.

Our busy conference speaking agenda looks like this.

Monday 3rd November

11am – More Horses! Low Linux on Z speeds up mainframe change

2.30pm – Open-Source Mainframe DevOps demonstration

3.45pm – Automate the heck out of every LPAR (using Ansible playbooks)

Tuesday 4th November

3.30pm – Mainframe IT Skills Overview – part of the WAVEZ 101 Track

4.45pm – Platform Engineering – a real-world use case

Wednesday 5th November

Midday – Market Survey Findings RoundTable (Executive Track – Invitation Only)

The full conference agenda is here.

Team Time

This is a real community show, and the attendee list reads like a who’s who in the UK mainframe world. From the major mainframe vendors such as IBM, Broadcom and BMC, to the crucial resellers, consultancies and service providers like TES Enterprise Solutions and Vertali, to the press presence of Planet Mainframe, to the notable end user organizations present, to the fantastic volunteers at the Open Mainframe Project, there’s an insightful, informative, conversation to be had every hour of the day.

Join Us

The mainframe community has redoubled its efforts in the last few years to engage more proactively and open its doors to the curious, and the Whittlebury Park conference is a real fixture of the mainframe community calendar.

Please make time to join us at one of our sessions or come and chat to us on the Expo floor (we’ll be hanging out with our partners, TES Enterprise Solutions at their booth).

We hope to see you there. If you haven’t yet registered – go here.

Further Reading For more information on how PopUp Mainframe can help revolutionize mainframe delivery in your organization, take a look at the web site, including this list of recent press articles.

Mainframe Innovation Pops Up in Ohio

The PopUp Mainframe team was recently in the mighty Midwest, taking part in both the illustrious SHARE conference, and the TechFieldDay Extra event, in Cleveland, Ohio. In this blog we summarise CEO Gary Thornhill’s presentation.

Introduction

As data from our 2025 mainframe market survey shows, mainframe delivery cycles are often hampered by bottlenecks in operational processes. Using PopUp Mainframe, these bottlenecks can be beaten, enabling mainframe teams to revolutionise mainframe delivery.

Our conference presentationsoutlined our uniquely rapid and flexible approach to supporting faster mainframe delivery. To do this, we introduced some of the latest capabilities of the PopUp Mainframe solution:

  • Full support of a modern mainframe CI/CD pipeline, using – in this case – IBM and open-source DevOps tools
  • The choice of Linux on Z or the cloud for deployment
  • The ability to invoke and shut down virtual mainframes in minutes
  • The facility to save, reset, and shareinstances of the PopUp Mainframe environment using the new ‘FastTrack’ capability
  • Integration with 3rd party data masking products for data compliance
  • The inclusion of Ansible playbooks for streamlined administration

Our Demo Scenario

In our presentation, we used a demo scenario, featuring a simple mainframe application, “NextGen Bank”, with a web-based UI, z/OS Connect to call the backend, atypical mix of COBOL, CICS, and Db2. The backend would ordinarily be a production LPAR on a physical mainframe – in our demo we ran it in a PopUp Mainframe environment, as a test version.

Invoking PopUp Mainframe X and Z Editions

There are two editions of the product – X Edition, for x86 hardware and the cloud, and the Z Edition, running on Linux on Z. Both provide a virtual, on-demand z/OS environment on-demand, only the underlying hardware changes.

You can invoke either in a few minutes.

Once the PopUp Mainframe product (or “PopUp”) is available, you can populate it with our choice of applications and data – our own unique dev/test environment, including compliant/masked data – to perform our task. This was totally configurable each time, of course.

Another key capability of a PopUp is to allow users to take a snapshot of the z/OS environment and, at any time, return to any of the snapshots. This meansyou can reset to a previous state anytime, perfect for testing out new features or upgrades. So, before we made a code change requested by the customer, we took a snapshot of this PopUp to save a ‘before’ state.

Implementing an Application Change under PopUp Mainframe

Thesample Next Gen Bank application was originally showing the customer transaction history in ascending date order, oldest first. For our demo, we have received a new change request, from the business, asking to see the most recent transaction at the top, which means the transaction history needed to be sorted in descending order.

In our example, the development process is a relatively straightforward CI/CD pipeline, featuring a standard IDE to do the development, then specific build and unit test steps, before deploying the code and running system tests. Of course, the stages, and the choice of tools, crucially, is completely flexible: PopUp supports all approaches.

Starting with the code change, in this scenario the developer checked out the code from the GitHub repository using VS Code, modified the query to retrieve the rows in descending order, and committed and pushed the code back to the GitHub repository. The CI/CD pipeline was automatically triggered by the code check-in. This pipeline used GitHub Actions, which, in this example, built the code using the IBM DBB facility, then conducted unit tests using the open-source tool COBOL-CHECK, and pushed the compiled binaries into an artefact repository, Artifactory. These binaries were then deployed onto a different z/OS instance using IBM’s deployment facility, Wazideploy, where integration tests were performed using the Galasa open-source testing framework.

Mainframe application processes are not always simple or successful.So, in our example, the testing reports an error. The application showed that the balances were now blank. As it turned out, the developer had forgotten another relevant change.

In situations like this, it is useful torevert to a previous working state and restart.

The PopUp Mainframe FastTrack capability reset our environment to the snapshot taken before we started the code change. With the environment quickly restored, the developer could isolate and fix the logic error.

With the code fixed (using the IDZ product this time – PopUp Mainframe supports your choice of IDE),the pipeline was this time successful.

Our simple example illustrates an environment that is productive, flexible, and scalable.

Operational Efficiency

A further new capability was the inclusion of pre-installed Ansible playbooks to assist with the administration of the PopUp environment. We showed one such playbook example to support adding and removing users within one PopUp instance without the reliance on, say, a RACF administrator.

Another important facet of a PopUp is that it can be shut down immediately –meaning no environments left running idle, and no wasted resources. As customers have told us, this is perfect for helping meetIT sustainability objectives.

Summary

Our presentations underscored our vision to revolutionize mainframe delivery by dramaticallyaccelerating the mainframe delivery process.

As we demonstrated, from a developer making a code change, committing to GitHub, then sequencing build, unit testing, deployment, and integration testing using a variety of 3rd party and open-source tools, resetting to a previous state, this all happens in the instantly available, flexible PopUp Mainframe environment.

Customers have reported up to a 400% increase in mainframe deliveries made, a reduction in the average time taken to deliver, significant sustainability metric gains by being able to switch off unused resources, and greater flexibility and responsiveness.

Thanks

Our thanks go to the fantastic Tech Field Day team and the panel of experts for their time and insights, and to the wider SHARE organization for their support.

Further Information

Watch the recording of our session via the Tech Field Day SHARE 2025 page

Keeping up to date – PopUp Mainframe Newsletter

We have just sent out our latest newsletter to hundreds of subscribers. In case you missed it, we’ve included a copy of the key points below. Contact us if you want to sign-up at the bottom of the page to receive future news from us!

PopUp Mainframe Newsletter

Greetings from PopUp Mainframe!

Where has the year gone? If, like us, you’ve been busy, it is sometimes useful to take a step back and look at the big events of the recent past. Allow us to catch you up with this quick summary of what we’ve been doing lately.

New Product Release

We are proud to announce our latest product releases are now available. PopUp Mainframe Z Edition and PopUp Mainframe X Edition introduce greater choice and flexibility for customers looking to accelerate mainframe delivery. For more information on the release, visit this page

Market Survey

We are delighted to share our new mainframe market survey. Covering a range of topics relevant to the mainframe market such as environment access, attitudes towards Linux, IT skills, tools usage, sustainability, delivery velocity, risk management and more, it is a must read for decision makers. To download the full report and related articles, head to this page.

Coming Soon! Join Us Live and Beat Those Bottlenecks

We are teaming up with industry analysts Futurum Group for a special webinar on June 18th, hosted by DevOps.com. We’ll be discussing our new market survey, key challenges facing mainframe leaders today, and our revolutionary approach to mainframe delivery. Register here for “Beating the Bottlenecks”.

Read all about it

Explore the PopUp Mainframe blog for insights on important mainframe delivery topics like DevOps, cost management, market trends, risk avoidance, and more.

And don’t forget to connect with PopUp Mainframe on LinkedIn, too.

Best wishes from the PopUp Mainframe team!

Product Announcement News

PopUp Mainframe Further Revolutionizes Mainframe Delivery

Instantly Available Mainframe Environments under Linux on Z or the Cloud Dramatically Accelerate Mainframe Delivery Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness

The team at PopUp Mainframe are delighted to announce the general availability (GA) of its new flagship mainframe modernization products – PopUp Mainframe X Edition and PopUp Mainframe Z Edition. PopUp Mainframe X and Z Edition provide an instantly available mainframe environment whenever required to help mainframe delivery teams accelerate urgent development and testing activities.

“As fantastic as the mainframe is as a production environment, there remain struggles and bottlenecks in how quickly change can be delivered, which brings a high cost of change. Our vision with PopUp Mainframe is to revolutionize the mainframe delivery process by offering a ready-to-use mainframe environment whenever you need it,” said CEO and Founder, Gary Thornhill.

Platform Flexibility

PopUp Mainframe product provides a functionally equivalent environment to z/OS to ensure the behaviour is predictable, regardless of the platform chosen. Separate editions offer flexibility for customers who want to be able to choose between x86 / cloud-based platforms (X Edition) or running on LinuxOne, or inside the mainframe IFL/KVM Linux environment (Z Edition).

Gary Thornhill explained, “For many organizations, cloud or x86 resources offer a cheap and readily available IT resource that can run a PopUp Mainframe instance. Other mainframe shops may have tighter access controls but have ready access to the IFL/KVM environments, or even LinuxOne, and our research suggests there’s a growing market looking to leverage these technologies. PopUp Mainframe Z Edition is specifically designed to support those mainframe users who are looking to maximize the value of those platform investments.”

Release Highlights

PopUp Mainframe’s instantly available mainframe environment removes common bottlenecks in the delivery process, with customers reporting increased delivery velocity of over 400%, while sustaining vital quality and risk requirements.

Key capabilities

  • Instantly available mainframe environment removes key bottlenecks, enabling teams to accelerate development, testing, and training activities
  • Deployment via Linux on Z (Z edition) or cloud (X edition) platforms removes additional hardware requirement, while potentially freeing up vital z/OS production LPARs
  • Fully compatible mainframe environment supports traditional ISPF and modern DevOps toolchains, ideal for cross-team collaboration and training
  • Robust configuration allows restoration of initial state, perfect for new software testing, R&D projects, and training programs.
  • Instant shutdown removes any environmental footprint when not in use to support Green IT initiatives

Key Operational Benefits

  • Accelerated delivery of over 300%
  • Efficient, compliant testing support through advanced data management
  • Sustainability improvements of up to 33% through effective platform management
  • Cost Efficiency improvements through improved platform usage

What They Said

As excited as we are about this release, we are even more thrilled that others share our enthusiasm:

Paul Knight, IBM z Innovation & Business Development at TES Enterprise Solutions, commented, “The PopUp Mainframe capability is another breakthrough technology that adds even greater value to the LinuxOne and IFL/KVM environments. As our clients continue to seek ways to maximise their IBM z investments, PopUp Mainframe stands out as a powerful tool—enabling them to accelerate mainframe innovation and drive measurable business value more efficiently than ever before”.

Steven Dickens, CEO & Principal Analyst at HyperFRAME Research, remarked, “The introduction of PopUp Mainframe’s tools on Linux on Z unlocks new possibilities for mainframe agility and workload testing.This strategic move enables organizations to harness Linux environments directly on the mainframe to allow for the deployment of modern DevOps processes while ensuring operational efficiency for mainframe teams.”

Find Out More

For more information on this release, visit the PopUp Mainframe Z Editon / X Edition product page.

Market Survey – PopUp Mainframe’s press release

Hot off the press! Read the PopUp Mainframe press release regarding our new mainframe market survey.

New Mainframe Market Survey Reveals Fresh Focus on Silos, Strategic Goals, and Specialization

Results Underline Modernization Appetite to Address Topical Challenges While Leveraging New Mainframe Capabilities

PopUp Mainframe Ltd, an enterprise software company dedicated to revolutionizing mainframe system delivery,today announced the findings of its Mainframe Survey, which reveals the latest market trends and 2025 plans for enterprises utilizing IBM mainframe technology.

The survey reveals the continued reliance, investment and perceived value of the mainframe environment across the sector, with ninety-eight percent of respondents saying that rely on the IBM mainframe to run their organization. A further 94% confirm their “potential to leverage additional workload capacity on specialist / Linux environments on Z,” with 97% seeking to make “increased use” of specialist mainframe processors.

The survey also uncovers major strategic challenges facing leaders today, with around eighty percent in each case citing speed of delivery, cost management, flexibility, risk managementand meeting sustainability targetsas important issues, and for which improvements were needed. Operationally, ready access to mainframe environments was given by nearly two thirds of respondents as a hindrance to meeting mainframe delivery needs, while both technical skills and adequate tooling challenges were cited by most respondents.

“As we see the attitudes around mainframe modernization continue to evolve, the platform’s ability to help deliver change rapidly, without risk, and with the right levels of flexibility, remains critical,” said PopUp Mainframe CEO, Gary Thornhill. “With 60 years of success and a brand-newmodel now available, it is no wonder so many organizations see the enduring value of the IBM mainframe. What our survey shows is a reminder that, in an ever-evolving digital world, overcoming important strategic and operational challenges continues to be an imperative for many organizations, and that there remain a variety of difficulties to overcome. The responses suggest to us that how the mainframe is used must evolve to meet these challenges. Essential is the requirement for organizations to innovate through both tooling and process, with emphasis on cultural change,” he added.

Conducted with Vanson Bourne, a global research and analysis company, the survey asked leading practitioners and IT executives from the UK and North America about the strategic importance of the IBM mainframe to their business, current challenges and future needs, as well as their development toolchains and resources.

“This survey allowed for Vanson Bourne to gather valuable data from the mainframe community on the platform’s continued relevance, as well as the forward-looking insights needed forPopUp Mainframe – and the mainframe community at large — to continue shaping the mainframe technology landscape,” said Katie Haslett, Senior Research Consultant at Vanson Bourne.

Other findings of theMainframe Survey include:

  • Material concerns over the availability of mainframe environments (88%),staffing limitations, and tooling (both 79%) were given as hindrances to meeting business objectives
  • Nearly a third of all respondents said 4 or more separate teams were involved in a standard development and delivery process for the mainframe, while 96% reported they experienced development and testing challenges using the IBM mainframe
  • 28% said implementing mainframe change in a shorter timeframe was of critical importance to their organization – and 81% said improvements were needed in that area
  • 36% said improving the flexibility / agility of mainframe deliveries was of critical importance to their organization – and 86% said improvements were needed
  • 37% said the ability to meet regulatory and data compliance requirements was of critical importance to their organization – and 82% said improvements were needed
  • 29% said greater cost efficiency was of critical importance to their organization – and 90% said improvements were needed
  • 30% said the ability to delivery on IT-related sustainability objectives was of critical importance to their organization – and 86% said improvements were needed

“The launch of the z17 underscores the mainframe’s enduring strength, cementing its position in the market,” said Steven Dickens, CEO & Principal Analyst at HyperFRAME Research. “With evolving application needs, organisations are turning to DevOps advancements to enhance performance and maintain a competitive edge, and PopUp Mainframe stands out as a solution worth evaluating in this context.”

Derek Britton, CMO at PopUp Mainframe, commented “These initial findings clearly demonstrate both the commitment of the mainframe market to the platform, and a market that is continuously challenging itself to improve what it can accomplish. The issues uncovered reflect a relentless motivationformainframe-centric modernization and innovation to achieve even greater organizational results”.

Additional Information

The full PopUp Mainframe Market Survey report and related information are now available here.