Re: MF99003

*WARNING* DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME..... er, I mean with VIRTUAL TAPE! Optical Image catalogs are supported and work very well for upgrades, Virtual Tape not only isn't supported it doesn't work either. Luckily IBM has code in there that stops you before you write byte 1 to your tape catalog, but you have wasted the time creating the image catalog and populating it with 'tapes'.

Basically what Jim is talking about is YOU create an image catalog of type *DVD. Then you populate it with a number of blank media (You can use the ADDVRTVOL parm on CRTIMGCLG to do this during the create step.) The first media needs to be about 2.5GB or so or it will fail with 'not enough space'. The rest of them can be smaller though I usually just make them all 2.5GB or so. If you don't make enough the build stops and asks you if it should make more but then they are named 'all funny' so I usually build 10 images and then delete the ones that don't get used. Remember too that you are NOT limited to 4.7GB size because you're not actually going to put them in a physical drive. The only reason not to make them all huge is that no matter how little is on the last one you still need to copy the entire disk image. Once created you mount the catalog in a virtual optical device (i.e. OPTVRT01) as you would any other catalog. Then when you use option 40 you specify OPTVRT01 for the target. The system will fill each DVD image and move on to the next automatically

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 9/26/2011 7:10 PM, Evan Harris wrote:

Hi Jim

Sorry to appear a bit thick and thanks for your replies so far. I've
just had a quick look at that option - how would I go about creating
image catalogs from it ? Or do you mean an image catalog in the guise
of a Virtual Tape ?

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Jim Oberholtzer<midrangel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You can copy it to tape which is Larry's favorite method if there are a
small number of disk units or create an image catalog with them.
Tomorrow I am using the image catalog. The V7 comes up with about 7
files altogether.

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects