SMF retrieval fails from VTS during migration of ATL to VTS

Products

• JARS SMF Director

Issue/Introduction

Site has an ATL and recently migrated to a new IBM TS7770 VTS.
Activated the new VTS and jobs are now using VTS tapes while the ATL is still available for read. 
After activating the VTS, the EXTRACT is abending.

In the job log you can see the job tried to mount ATL tape V***** on ATL drive 55** and after some time it tried to mount VTS tape A***** on the same ATL drive 55**.    The job eventually timed out.

 

Environment

Release : 12.7

Cause

The problem is that EXTRACT will attempt to use the same tape unit during processing for all data sets in a way to save time in mounting the tapes.  However, since you have migrated to a new VTS, there are datasets on both the old VTS and new VTS, and you won't be able to mount the volumes with the new datasets on the old VTS (they are separate entities).  

Resolution

Use the TAPEVOLCHG(RELEASE) operand on the EXTRACT.  The default is NORELEASE. 

EXTRACT/PRINT control statements can be found here