Is CA Vtape licensed on a data capacity basis?

Products

• Vtape Virtual Tape System

Issue/Introduction

We are about to add additional disk capacity for CA-Vtape disk-cache.  Is CA-Vtape licensed on a data capacity basis? And if so, does it differentiate between disk-cache and physical tape media storage capacities?  I’m just wondering that if we add extra disk capacity and move logical tape volumes from physical tape media to being all on CA-Vtape disk-cache, would we be required to change the CA-Vtape capacity license?

Environment

Release : 12.6

Component : VTAPE

Cause

N/A

Resolution

The CA Vtape licensing requirements are based upon the number of concurrent Virtual drives in use during I/O processing.  The CA Vtape parameters 'LicensedLocalVTD' and 'LicensedRemoteVTD' are used to define these values in CA Vtape.  The CA Vtape command /SVTn D S can be used to display the current number of devices licensed (and the /SVTn D P,L command can be used to display the current settings for the 2 parameters mentioned above).  The amount of CA Vtape cache, tape capacity, etc. are not involved with the CA Vtape licensing per se.  The following CA Vtape message is issued whenever the license threshold is exceeded: 

SVTnPX120W  <drivetype> drive usage <nn>, exceeds licensed limit for <nn> concurrent active drive(s)

When the CA Vtape parm 'LicensedLocalVTD' and 'LicensedRemoteVTD' are set to -1, no checks will be done for the active CA Vtape drives, but a SVT1IR507I message requesting the value be changed will be issued every eight hours by every CA Vtape™ Virtual Tape System Subsystem running with the -1 value.  It is recommended that the customer Broadcom account rep be contacted to determine what these values should be set to.  CA Vtape will continue to run with a value of '-1', but this basically defeats the purpose of having this check in place (and may violate the Broadcom license agreement). 

Additional Information

Additional information concerning the 'LicensedLocalVTD' and 'LicensedRemoteVTD' CA Vtape parameters can be found here: 

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-mainframe-software/traditional-management/ca-vtape-virtual-tape-system/12-6/configuring/the-parameter-library-parmlib/vtparms-parmlib-member/startup-options.html