Spool volumes can be deleted dynamically by the operator as required to meet your installation's requirements. The operator can either halt ($Z SPL) or drain ($P SPL) entire spool volumes.

Some considerations must be recognized and proper precautions must be taken to prevent improper usage of the spool volume deletion commands. If the volume being deleted (halted or drained) contains spooled or remote messages or the JESNEWS data set, they are automatically moved to another volume; however, this process might not be immediate. Spooled remote messages and SYSOUT are moved from the draining volume when they become the lowest-numbered job on the volume. Also, if there are no active volumes available for these data sets, the deletion process will not complete until an active volume is available to accept them.

The $Z SPL command can be used to allow only currently active work to complete. No new work is selected, and no new tracks can be allocated. A volume is classified as halting until the currently active workload on the volume has completed the current phase of job processing and the volume is unallocated to all systems in the multi-access spool complex. When complete, the volume is classified as inactive. However, the operator can display information about the volume or individual jobs on that volume. You must issue a $S SPL command to bring the volume back into the JES2 environment.

The $P SPL command prevents any available tracks from being selected for allocation. Until all jobs currently allocated to the volume have completed all phases of job processing the volume is considered to have a status of draining. The spool volume is drained when no allocated spool space remains on that volume, and the volume is unallocated to all systems in the multi-access spool complex. When the spool volume is drained, JES2 does not retain any information concerning that volume. Therefore, the operator cannot display information about the volume.

The CANCEL operand can be added to the drain command ($P SPL) to cancel and deallocate all cancellable jobs on either an active or inactive spool volume. All jobs and SYSOUT will be deleted from the volume; any spooled remote messages and the JESNEWS data set (if present) are automatically moved to another volume. As with the $P SPL and $Z SPL commands, the removal of these items might not occur immediately. Also, if any data sets residing on another volume belong to a job being canceled, they are also purged. JES2 issues message $HASP890 to inform the operator of all such jobs. All other resources are recovered.

You can use the $P SPL,CANCEL command to drain an inactive volume and purge all jobs allocated to it. This can result in lost track groups on other volumes. Any lost space can be recovered at an all-member warm start or the JES2 automatic spool reclamation function will recover them within 1 week, whichever occurs first. If the spool volume can be remounted, the $S SPL,P,CANCEL command will prevent the loss of spool space.

Before reusing a spool volume, you should erase (overwrite with binary zeros) the volume. This avoids any inadvertent disclosure of classified or sensitive information.

Attention: If all spool volumes are deleted, JES2 will not be capable of performing any work. For information concerning the use and syntax of the various operands that can be used with spool volume configuration commands, see z/OS JES2 Commands.