Obtaining VM/370

If any of the links provided here are broken I would suggest checking www.cbttape.org as it seems to keep up-to-date links to everything.

The oldest, four pack system

The public domain distribution media for OS/360, DOS/360 and TOS/360, VM/370 and TSS/370 as well as Turnkey3 MVS3.8J were available at http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/ last time I checked. So it is possible to obtain a working VM/370 from there.

The community edition

There is also a community supported edition of this now at http://vm370.org/index.htm. That should probably be your first point of call.
This seems to be a maintained bugfixed version of the origional old five pack system. As it is community supported it probably has the best help available in forums and still the most maintained.

Only read on if the community edition does not meet your needs.

The five pack system

I covered obtaining and how to use the much older five pack system in the DOS/VS page. That has a few more details on how to actually start and use VM/370 for that specific OS.

The six pack system

There is also a six pack system by Robert O'Hara, Paul Edwards, and Dave Wade that I have used sucessfully to run my heavily customised copy of MVS3.8J (lots of additional dasd) under. For me that is the most useful. Moshix has created a youtube video on obtaining and using the sixpack version.
The six pack system supports larger disk sizes so the 3380 (and 3390) disks in my existing MVS3.8J system could be moved under VM/370. Not a consideration if you intend to run an older OS that does not need large disks of course.
The six pack system also supports full screen editing, pretty essential, even if the commands take a bit of geting used to :-).

IMPORTANT

There are lots of Videos on youtube on how to use VM/370 under hercules; however they are all very release/version specific. For example commands used in a Video for a four pack system will not work on a six pack system, dasd volsers change, libraries usage changes (ie: the commands to edit dasd assignments that work on the sixpack do not have matching library names on the four pack).
Basically you need a very good understanding of VM/370 to make it worth while trying to run it if you intend to customise it as a lot of the tutorials will not help.

Only slightly related

There is also this video on running Amdahl UTS UNIX under VM/370 if you are interested in that.