Experiences and tips from a team of system programmers and testers who run a Parallel Sysplex on which we perform the final verification of a z/OS release and System z hardware and System Storage before they become generally available to clients.
The IBM watsonx Assistant for Z (WXA4Z) 3.1.0 release became generally available on December 12, 2025. It's a Generative AI solution built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate running on OpenShift and IBM Software Hub, designed specifically for IBM Z mainframe environments. We will focus on running the WXA4Z on the Spyre Accelerator on IBM Z with granite-3.3-8b-instruct models.
The goal of this document is to capture our experiences at working through the installation and deployment of WXA4Z. The tasks require significant infrastructure and technical preparation. We will highlight the steps taken, key observations, challenges encountered and lessons learned while setting up the solution in our OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) environment. The intent is to provide a practical insight into how WXA4Z is implemented, how its components and services come together during the deployment, and basically what teams can expect when following the installation process, serving as a reference and knowledge sharing.