My employer is planning to migrate our computing infrastructure
to a pair of new data centers, each with a Version 6 TSM server
running under mainframe Linux, each writing copy pool volumes on
tape drives at the other site, and each with a library manager
instance of TSM to control sharing of tape drives and volumes
between local and remote TSM servers.

The original plan was to develop both new data centers
concurrently. In order to spread out the spending, a recent
change in plans calls for a transitional stage with one of the
new data centers writing copy pool volumes to our current data
center, which has a TSM 5.4 server under mainframe Linux.

Adding a mainframe library manager instance to the current data
center is problematic. The library manager will need to be at
Version 6, because the new data center will have a Version 6
server and a library manager client cannot be at a higher level
than the library manager. It is nearly impossible to have two
different levels of TSM server code coexist on the same Linux
image. We do not have zVM, and carving another LPAR out of our
aging and fairly small mainframe is not an appealing prospect.

Am I correct in understanding that a library manager can run
on a different platform than its clients? Would there be any
problem with setting up a Version 6 library manager under
x86 Linux running in a virtual machine? We already have a
sizable x86 virtualization infrastructure. The tape library
at the current data center is an IBM 3494 that receives mount
and dismount requests via Ethernet.