Re: SAVSYS without a tape drive

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I might be a consultant if my favorite answer is "It Depends."

It Depends. :-)

You CANNOT Boot a virtual tape. No. Can't Do. No way. BUT I sell disk 
and virtual tape is good at using disk so Save Away!! (DO it twice even!)

You might be able to boot a virtual optical. Two ways:

a) If you host partition can present that image to your client. Such as 
VIOS or IBM i. Of course this is not useful for a bare metal recovery.

2) If you have a partition that can host the image with NFS and bootp 
and your server is Power6 or newer and IBM i 7.1 or newer, and you have 
an HMC. And you know the setup and the startup commands.

SO as others have mentioned you usually don't do SAVSYS a lot, typically 
after PTFs and upgrades. So if you have at least the SAVSYS on bootable 
media such as DVD you can get the process started.

        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 2/5/2014 1:21 PM, fbocch2595@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Hi Folks, you gave mesome info/advice on saving to IMGCLG and it's running well although when newvolumes are created it take several hours.  Now though, I've been told to switch to virtual tape and I'm wondering what you folks think aboutvirtual tape?  I know it's better for performance but IBM support told me "ASAVSYS is one of the main items I would NOT recommend to save to virtualoptical or virtual tape for emergency purposes".  Do you folks agreeor not?  Can the virt tape of a SAVSYS be used in an emergency? What are the options to use when not using tape drives and what do you recommend and why?
>
> Thanks, Frank