Virtual Tape - spanning volumes

We are moving a system to the cloud where the cloud provider does NOT support tape.

The cloud system is provisioned at V7R3 and current on PTFs.

We created a virtual tape on the source machine with 25 volumes and ran a SAVSYS21 (about 600GB).

We FTPed all 25 volumes to the cloud server and loaded them into a image catalog which verified.

What we find is that IBM I has no ability to "span" volumes so if we run a DSPTAP TAPVRT01 the results are what's on the mounted tape only.

Same with any tape command: RSTUSRPRF, RSTLIB, etc.

IBM reports that there is no ability for any of these commands to load the next tape volume (see below).

To run a restore *ALLUSR, per IBM, it appears that we would first need to run a DSPTAP to an outfile to get the volume number for each library/object we need to restore and then run that looping through a file of library/objects.

Any other ideas like combining all 25 volumes into one volume?

Thx,

Jerry


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kkspang (IBM)
Aug 26, 2021, 20:19

Hi Jerry,

It sounds like you did a Option 21 save to virtual Tape (image catalog) and you have 23 images/volumes in there. Can you do a print screens of all the volumes and upload to case? The DSPTAP you sent only shows Vol01 starting with a SAVSYS sequence 1 through 9. Vol02 only shows sequence 34 which is still part of SAVSYS.

When you run a DSPTAP, it is only going to show you the contents of the volume specified on VOL parameter or if you left the default to *MOUNTED, it will only display contents of the volume that is currently mounted. DSPTAP does not automatically display contents of other volumes that are continued. It can only display contents of one volume at a time. You can from the WRKIMGCLG, Option 12, mount next volume, run DSPTAP OUTPUT(*PRINT). When it completes, go in and mount next volume and run DSPTAP again. I assume you are looking for where the user data is located amongst the 23 virtual volumes. Your SAVSECDTA can be found at sequence 41 for R710. The SAVLIB *NONSYS should start around sequence 43.

WRKIMGCLG, Option 12 on your virtual tape optical, do screen print on each page showing all your volumes and upload to this case.

If I misunderstood what you are looking for, please let me know.

Thank you

Kim Spang

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