Alain, I'm not trying to be a sales"person" ... but as far as I know, CA's MIM is the best solution for the environment you describe. The AUTOPATH feature of CA MIM (together with CA's VM:Tape which I know you run) will handle seamless drive sharing between/among your various z/OS and z/VM systems moving drives where they need to be to satisfy pending mount and allocation requests.
This solution requires running CA MIM on both z/OS and z/VM ... JR (Steven) Imler CA Senior Software Engineer Tel: +1 703 708 3479 Fax: +1 703 708 3267 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alain Benveniste Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2007 03:28 PM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: How to share tape drives I read a similar discussion on the mailing list about assign. We don't have any tools to share tapes between 1 VM & 20 MVS. Something has been developped in the past which is not really up-to-date.= We remarked it needs too much CPU to do its work. I project to use our VM to be THE platform to share tape drives between lpars in a normal prod or when we do our disaster recovery tests (MVS are= lvl2). We only have ATL robots. I just tested one thing that could give other id= eas to investigate. I have attached a drive with the multiuser option. In parallel it was use= d by a MVS. Then I tested the dfsmsrm q dev xxx (assign cmd and I was surprised to get the volser that was mounted in MVS. If dfsmsrm is able t= o send back this info, can't it be able to send back the part number or the= MVS partname too ? That could be great. And (What VM diag D0 would say if a tape is mounted in a MVS ?) Alain Benveniste
