You may need to update your vital record specifications, either to exploit a new function available in the latest release or to make policy changes based on the needs of your business. You can perform these steps to ensure that these changes go smoothly.

1. Before updating your vital record specifications, back up your DFSMSrmm control data set using EDGBKUP or EDGHSKP.
2. Perform cleanup on the name vital record specifications by making sure that any retention information in them is correct. DFSMSrmm provides the EDGRVCLN REXX exec described in EDGRVCLN REXX procedure to clean up vital record specifications to report and clean up problems with name vital record specifications.
3. Run DFSMSrmm inventory management vital record processing so the DFSMSrmm control data set reflects the cleanup you have done.
4. Make sure that all systems sharing DFSMSrmm control data sets have the same parmlib options.
5. Run the inventory management VERIFY function against the control data set without introducing any of the new vital record specification functions. When you run VERIFY, changes are not actually made to the DFSMSrmm control data set so that you can look at the results before any changes are made. The changes that would have been made on a non-VERIFY run are included in the REPORT file and written to the ACTIVITY file.
6. Inspect the inventory management VERIFY ACTIVITY file by looking at changes in matching vital record specification information, vital record status, and retention date. DFSMSrmm provides a sample job EDGJACTP that you can use with DFSORT to format and print fields in the ACTIVITY file. Verify that the ACTIVITY file records reflect only the changes you have made. If no changes have been made, the ACTIVITY file should be empty. If there are entries, run EDGJACTP from SAMPLIB and look at the summary files. Look in particular at "VRSS DD Statement - summary by status". Verify the data sets that changed from V/R to not V/R retained or vice versa. The details of why it changed is shown in "VRS DD Statement - data sets with changed V/R status". The reports produced in other DD statements will also be of interest. Be sure to review each of the summary and detail files to understand the changes that would have been made.
7. Correct vital record specifications as needed to make sure that the policies you want are in place.
8. Continue running the VERIFY function and inspect the results until you get the results you expect using the new functions
9. Begin defining and updating vital record specifications to use new or different options and retention. We suggest starting slowly until you gain more experience with using the new vital record specification functions. We recommend using the RMM ISPF dialog to add the new vital record specifications or to make changes to existing vital record specifications. The kind of changes you make might include VRS release options, use of COUNT(0), exploit the OPTION GDG of parmlib, consolidation to generic data set name masks, or cleanup of unused VRSs or VRS chains.
10. Repeat the process from step 5 and step 9 until you are satisfied that the results are what you expect.
11. Run inventory management production run processing.
12. Check the vital records retention report to make sure that data sets and volumes are retained as you intended.