Defining a CICS VR XCF group

In a sysplex environment an instance of the CICS® VR server address space must be installed and running on particular systems.

Each system that:

Only one instance of CICS VR can be active for each system.

Various tasks performed by the CICS VR server address space update the contents of the CICS VR Recovery Control Data Sets (RCDSs) allocated to the CICS VR server. The information in the RCDSs is then read by CICS VR during recovery job construction and processing. Therefore, to ensure data integrity of the RCDSs it might be desirable to logically group the CICS VR instances.

For example, consider the following scenario:

In this scenario, if a common VSAM sphere becomes corrupted, the updates made by batch jobs ran on both systems need to be recovered. Therefore, the same RCDSs must be allocated to both of the CICS VR instances in the sysplex. To enforce usage of the same RCDSs, CICS VR contains the CICSVR_GRPNAME_SUFFIX() parameter.

CICS VR allows you to logically group CICS VR instances into cross-system coupling facility (XCF) groups by specifying the following parameter in the active IGDSMSxx member:
CICSVR_GRPNAME_SUFFIX(suffix)
Where suffix specifies the CICS VR XCF group name suffix. The suffix can be 1 - 4 characters in length, and can be alphanumeric, A-Z, 0-9, and national ($, @, and #). PROD is the default value.

CICS VR ensures that all systems defined with the same CICS VR XCF group name suffix use the same set of RCDSs. Therefore, all CICS VR instances that either run batch jobs or notify CICS VR of backups created for common VSAM spheres must use the same CICS VR XCF group name.

When grouping CICS VR instances into XCF groups, the following notes must be considered: