Mounts of vts tapes last very long

Products

• Dynam for VSE
• Dynam VSE Option

Issue/Introduction

Sometimes the time needed between Mount scratch message CADT008I and dynamtvm is attaching the tape device "CADT007I **** LABEL..."are several minutes rather than seconds.This seems to be at times when a number of tape mounts are being processed at the same time. 
This happens ocassionally.

Environment

z/VSE 5.x 6.x
CA Dynam/T VSE 7.1
CA Dynam/T VM 3.0
RMSMASTER
IBM TS3500 VTS library 

Cause

In this situation the RMS Scratch Categories being used with the “Scratch Fast Ready” attribute has not been configured in RMS.
What this means if this is not set, is that when a scratch tape is selected, before it becomes “mounted”, any previously written data is restored from back-end storage to be presented as the “mounted tape”.
The delay is the IBM Tape Library restoring the tape to its previous state. 
 

Resolution

Customer worked with IBM to set RMS Scratch Categories being used with the “Scratch Fast Ready” attribute.
Unfortunately, afterwards the tapes has not been attached to VSE automatically by CA Dynam/T VM.

In addition it was needed to change the TAPECHK option in the DTPARMS from TAPECHK=YES to TAPECHK=NO. Then rebuild the DynamCMS components (Activator should do this).

Also needed to be set:
TAPEINT=YES allows the initialization of tapes on the fly. 
OWNCHK=NO would skip owner id checking during AVR processing. 
PROTECT=YES allows the use of any volser defined in the catalog to be used even if it hasn't been initialized by Dynam/T. 

Additional Information

When the IBM VTS presents a "Fast Ready" SCRATCH tape, it will not have any Dynam/T OWNERID in the VOL1 label, so TAPECHK must be set to NO.
It is also recommended, to be sure the catalog and VTS are in sync with each other, that the TDYNIBM Utility (DYNAMCMS TDYNIBM) is run.