Overview
DOS/360 originally supported 24-bit addressing. As the underlying hardware evolved, VSE/ESA acquired support for 31-bit addressing. IBM released z/VSE Version 4 in 2007. z/VSE Version 4 requires 64-bit z/Architecture hardware and supports 64-bit real mode addressing. The latest shipping release (as of November 2011) is z/VSE 5.1.
IBM recommends that z/VSE customers run Linux on zSeries alongside, on the same physical system, to provide another 64-bit application environment that can access and extend z/VSE applications and data via Hipersockets using a wide variety of middleware. CICS, one of the most popular enterprise transaction processing systems, is extremely popular among z/VSE users and now supports recent innovations such as Web services. DB2 is also available and popular.
Job Control Language (JCL) is z/VSE's batch processing interface. There is also another, special interface for system console operators. z/VSE, like z/OS systems, had traditionally supported 3270 terminal user interfaces. However, most z/VSE installations have at least begun to add Web browser access to z/VSE applications. z/VSE's TCP/IP is a separately priced option for historic reasons, and is available in two different versions from two vendors.
Read more about this topic: VSE (operating System)