On Saturday, 05/22/2010 at 02:36 EDT, TaeMin Baek <[email protected]> 
wrote:
> When one guest OS/390 access to a certain dataset, 
> 1) z/VM CP control the DASD and set it reserved 
> 2) if other OS/390 guest try to access different dataset in same DASD, 
it must 
> wait and CP continue to check until DASD is released.
>
> Is the above logic of shaing DASD is right?
> If it is right, i think GRS is useless now and it can give more workload 
to CP.

Not quite, no.  Confirming what Kris said, OS/390 issues a RESERVE command 
to the virtual DASD and CP remembers it.  Since you have a fullpack 
minidisk, if you also haved the dasd volume defined as SHARED on an 
RDEVICE statement in SYSTEM CONFIG, then CP will also issue a real RESERVE 
so that it can be shared with other LPARs.  If you aren't sharing the dasd 
volume with other LPARs, you can leave it as unshared.

Further, it is *OS/390* that keeps checking, not CP.  That constant 
checking is what will drive up the CPU consumption, as CP has to keep 
saying rejecting the I/O.

> Today we tried to change sharing DASD method from with using Virtual 
> Reseve/Release to without using Virtual Reseve/Release. 
> What i mean is that i don't use MDISK with 'V' option. Only define MDISK 
with 
> 'MW' option. 

The question is really "Why is OS/390 issuing hw reserves?"  Because 
something (e.g. JES) is issuing RESERVEs or ISGENQ RESERVEVOLUME=YES (I 
don't know if ISGENQ exists in OS/390). 

> I want to let GRS in OS/390 to control dataset level sharing like in 
Native 
> LPAR mode. 
> I guess it might reduce the CP workload relate to reserve/release DASD. 

GRS gives you the ability to control whether or not RESERVE will cause a 
real reserve to be issued to the hw.  You can convert a RESERVE to a 
global ENQ by placing the dataset and queue name in the RESERVE conversion 
RNL.  You may have to turn on the ENQ/DEQ/RESERVE monitor to see what's 
happening and get all the correct names.

When you do this, then it will no longer be necesssary for OS/390 to poll 
the device to see if the hw reserve is still there.  When one system 
issues DEQ for the volume, the other systems will be notified via GRS and 
one of them will race.

Note that you should turn off the hw reserve ONLY if the dataset or volume 
is NOT being shared outside of the GRS complex.

> But the problem is JES failed to start because it cannot access the 
volume 
> containg checkpoint dataset. 
> The message said the volume containing checkpoint dataset is not shared.

Without the "V", the RESERVE macro issued by JES fails.

Caveat: I am not a z/OS or GRS expert.

Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott

Reply via email to