With careful planning, you can create a deployment manager cell that includes nodes on both distributed, i5/OS® and z/OS® operating system platforms.
For example, you can create a deployment manager cell that includes i5/OS nodes, z/OS nodes, Linux® nodes, UNIX® nodes, and Windows® nodes. This kind of configuration is referred to as a heterogeneous cell.
A heterogeneous cell does require significant planning. Setting up a heterogeneous cell can also take more time as some of the tasks can not be automated. The "Heterogeneous Cells – cells with nodes on mixed operating system platforms" white paper outlines the planning and system considerations required to build a heterogeneous cell.
If you use the administrative console to create a new server, you choose the server template that provides the initial configuration settings for the server. After you select a managed node on which to create a server, the administrative console offers you the choice of templates that can be used for the operating system platform of that node.