Recovery of Processor Operations Target System Connections in the event of Hardware Management Console Outage

Processor Operations target system connections rely on a fully operational Support Element (SE) or a Hardware Management Console (HMC), in order to monitor active target system connections or to execute commands against defined target systems.

If the connection to the HMC is lost, there are 2 major reasons for the failure:

  1. Shutdown of the HMC for maintenance reasons (planned outage).
  2. Technical failure or accidental shutdown of the HMC (unplanned outage).

In case of a planned outage, it is strongly recommended to close any active target system connections for that HMC as follows:

  1. Issue Processor Operations host-based command ISQXCLS, or
  2. Issue Line command 'C' in the Processor Operations target system summary panel (see host-based command ISQXDST), or
  3. Issue Processor Operations common command CTRLCONS (see the note at the end of this section regarding command CTRLCONS).

Once the HMC is active again, the previously closed target system connections can be re-initiated using host-based command ISQXIII , or line command 'I' in the Processor Operations target system summary panel (see host-based command ISQXDST).

For an unplanned outage, check on the duration of the outage and if Processor Operations has received an error notification (event message from the HMC).

If the interrupt is for a short period, and if Processor Operations receives an event failure from the HMC (messages AOFA0998 and AOFA0999 as described in IBM Z® System Automation Messages and Codes), Processor Operations might succeed in re-establishing the broken connection on its own immediately.

If Processor Operations does not receive any event failure message, the connection will remain in an INITIALIZED status, though it may change to, for example, TARGET HARDWARE PROBLEM if the status polling process detects there is a problem. If the target system connection has this problem status, AND if the reason obviously is due to an outage of the HMC, AND if Processor Operations did not succeed in automatically re-establishing the target system connection, the recommended recovery steps are as follows:

  1. Wait till the affected HMC is available again,
  2. Issue command ISQXCLS for all affected target systems to properly close and clean up the Processor Operations connection,
  3. Issue command ISQXIII for all affected target systems to re-establish Processor Operations connection.
Note: In order to shutdown the HMC in a controlled manner, the Processor Operations common command CTRLCONS can be used. CTRLCONS will automatically close any still active target system connections to that HMC.