RECYCLE not releasing DUPLEX tapes as expected

Products

• Vtape Virtual Tape System

Issue/Introduction

The virtual volumes from a PRIMARY backstore tape are on 10 DUPLEX tapes. This is because the DUPLEX tapes were closed manually before they filled up.
In order to free these partial used DUPLEX tapes RECYCLE runs with this PRIMARY volume in the PINCLUDE list, but it does not release the 10 DUPLEX tapes as expected. 

What is the reason for this?

Environment

Release : 12.6

Component : CA VTAPE

Cause

The PRIMARY tape was requested for RECALL while it was being recycled.
RECYCLE stopped processing the current PRIMARY volume resulting in message SVTSRC017W.
For example: 

         VIRTUAL DSN RETCODE
GROUP SUB VOLSER SEQ MESSAGE# RSNCODE DESCRIPTION 
----- --- ------ --- ---------- --------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
    2 L 100000 P SVTSRC017W 0004.0024 Physical VOLSER=P00001 is required by another JOB
    2 L 200044 P SVTSRC017W 0004.0024 Physical VOLSER=P00001 is required by another JOB 
    2 L 200046 P SVTSRC017W 0004.0024 Physical VOLSER=P00001 is required by another JOB  
... 
... 

The SVTSRC017W message is then issued for all of the virtual volumes that have not been recycled yet
from the PRIMARY and thus the related DUPLEX tapes for these volumes are not released. 

Resolution

Run RECYCLE with RECYCLE PHYSICAL(vvvvvv),SOURCE(PRIMARY),TARGET(DUPLEX).
If in this case the PRIMARY volume is requested for a for RECALL, this results in message 

SVTnRC020I

vvvvvv is required by RECALL. RECYCLE is paused but will resume when the
volser is available. If necessary use the stop command to terminate       

If the PRIMARY volume is no longer used by RECALL, it is re-mounted by RECYCLE and processing continues,
until all of the virtual volumes have been recycled, which will release all DUPLEX tapes that were connected to the PRIMARY.