Planning for operation tasks

Once you have established your logical parmlib values to define your consoles and their use, you need to consider how your operators will interact with MVS™ at your installation.

The tasks of starting, running, and stopping systems involve controlling the MVS system software and most installation hardware, including processors, channel paths, I/O devices as well as the MCS consoles and extended MCS consoles that operators use to perform their tasks. In a multisystem environment, you need to decide how much control over the systems in a complex or sysplex you want your operators to have to meet your operations goals for the installation.

While planning MVS operations, you or your operators need to understand how to develop procedures for daily operations and how to make those procedures work best for the installation. As operations planner, you and your operators must also be able to predict problems and set up procedures to handle them.

The tasks of operating a z/OS system that are described in this topic include:

Initializing the system
Interacting with system functions
Controlling shared DASD

Your installation can specify logical parmlib members that can affect how your operators handle these basic tasks. This topic describes operator tasks from the point of view of MVS operations planning and what you can do to simplify how operators run MVS.

Other basic operator tasks include:

Building, controlling, or rebuilding a global resource serialization ring or star complex. These tasks are described in z/OS MVS Planning: Global Resource Serialization.
Responding to failing devices and reconfiguring system resources.
Controlling the following system activities:
- Controlling system status, device status, the availability of paths, or the system restart functions
- Controlling time-sharing
- Controlling jobs
- Controlling system information recording for SMF, system trace, the generalized trace facility (GTF), or master trace.
- Quiescing the system
- Stopping the system
These tasks are described in z/OS MVS System Commands, which also describes the syntax for every MVS command and provides examples of commands.

Operators can activate dynamic I/O configuration for MVS using the Hardware Configuration Definition or the ACTIVATE command. For information, see z/OS HCD Planning and z/OS MVS System Commands.

Operators can use commands to control and display information about MVS and Advanced Program-to-Program Communication (APPC). APPC uses the Systems Network Architecture (SNA) LU 6.2 protocol and allows interconnected systems to communicate through applications that exchange data. The APPC/MVS environment is controlled through SYS1.PARMLIB members APPCPMxx and ASCHPMxx, and MVS commands START, SET, and DISPLAY. For information, see z/OS MVS Planning: APPC/MVS Management, z/OS MVS System Commands, and z/OS MVS Initialization and Tuning Reference.

Operators can activate the AutoIPL function so that the system can take predefined actions automatically when it is about to enter a disabled wait state. An automatic response can be to re-IPL z/OS®, or to take a stand alone dump (SADMP), or to take a SADMP and have SADMP re-IPL z/OS when it has finished. See Using the automatic IPL function for details.

Operators need to take certain software-side actions after performing the dynamic CPU addition on the hardware side. The newly-added CPUs are either not available or offline and thus need to be brought online. In addition, because the total number of the active processors changes, operators might want to adjust the trace buffer size of the system. See Exploiting dynamic CPU addition for more details.