Planning for virtual and physical volumes

As part of your planning process, you need to determine the number of virtual and stacked physical volumes required for your workload.

The topics in this section provide information to help you determine the total number of virtual volumes that are required, suggestions about the volume serial number (VOLSER) ranges to define and the number of physical volumes required. The VOLSER of the virtual and physical volumes must be unique throughout a system-managed storage complex (SMSplex) and throughout all storage hierarchies such as DASD, tape, and optical storage media. To minimize the risk of misidentifying a volume, the VOLSER should be unique throughout the grid and across different clusters in different TS3500 or TS4500 libraries.