When planning for a multisystem environment, consider the following items:
The Global VCAT provides the mechanism for sharing and controlling Virtual Volume access between multiple CA Vtape Subsystems.
One or more CA Vtape subsystems sharing the same Global VCAT and Linux file server comprise a CA Vtape Complex.
You can implement more than one Complex by creating and sharing different Global VCATs. Typically, this is done to separate test and production data.
For performance reasons, CA Vtape uses hardware reserves against the DASD volume on which the Global VCAT resides.
Virtual Devices are unique to an individual system and are not shared. For example, Virtual Device F05 on system A is not the same device as Virtual Device F05 on system B since they are being emulated by separate started tasks. Both devices can be online and in use at the same time on their respective systems.
Virtual Volumes can be shared across multiple subsystems and are serialized just like physical tapes.
Concurrent read of a Virtual Volume is allowed if the reader is CA Disk. For instance, if multiple CA Disk auto-restores are triggered, on one or more systems, for data sets that reside on the same Virtual Volume, CA Vtape will allow the auto-restores to access that Virtual Volume at the same time.
The CA Vtape parmlib supports symbolic substitution in its parmlib member names and parmlib attribute values. This support will allow you to use a single parmlib to support your multiple system configuration.
Note: For more information about symbolic substitution, see the chapter “Product Verification.”
