Thanks to everyone who has replied to my post. My research has gone in a new direction the last few days.
During the holiday weekend, when system activity on both of our machines was relatively low, I was able to compare the RMF channel utilization values by running the same large disk-to-disk copy batch job at each site, and found out that the channel utilization unumbers come out *very* different between the two sites! (35% utilization at one site, with no other batch or online users, compared to 8-10% at the other site, with this job *and* some production activity running.) So the question now is not what is causing the heavy channel utilization at one site...rather, it is why is the utilization showing up so differently between sites? Here are some clues that we've been chasing. 1) The big difference between the two configurations is that z/OS is running as a z/VM guest at the site with the supposed heavy utilization, and running in a native LPAR at the other site. 2) When we look at RMF Monitor III on the system with the supposed heavy utilization, we receive the message "CHANNEL report is incomplete - CPMF unavailable, modified, or restarted". 3) We have done a lot of looking since then and narrowed down the odd figures to only the FICON connections. 4) We brought up a native LPAR on the same machine with the VM guest, and RMF Monitor III does *not* show either high total utilization figures or the CPMF error message. 5) We looked at chpid activity from the HMC, and it was high. However, the HMC manual has a disclaimer that for fiber channels, the channel is considered "busy" any time an operation is pending, even if the channel is waiting for the device to respond, and thus activity on the HMC may show as much higher than what is reported in RMF. We are hoping to have the z/OS guest isolated in its own native LPAR by the end of the month. By most indications, this problem will then be resolved. But I would prefer to know ahead of time what's going on here so that we're sure of this. If anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it. Thanks, Laura ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
