Hello,
         I have been running TSM 4.1 on z/OS for a year and a half now,
(started on OS390 2.7).   I wanted to take advantage of and follow the
standard usage of our tape systems so I set up the TSM tape system in a way
that I now question.  I would like people to let me know if they are doing
things like I am or not.  If you would like to explain what you do, ood but
please just let me know if I am out on my own with this.  I am trying to
determine if it is worth my time to change things.  It is a little odd but
here I go...
            I set up my 6 9840 tape drives with two different DEVICE
definitions.  I called one ONSITE9840 and the other OFFSITE9840.  I did this
because our entire CA1 Tape handling and STK SILO handling is based on the
high level qualifier of the data set name on the first file of the tape.
So I gave the 2 device classes different high level qualifiers, told the CA1
and STK software what I was doing and the normal running production system
that put tapes in a vault pattern that has the offsite tapes go to our DR
site with all the other tapes needed at DR was taken care of.  No other
special handling.   It also took care of ejecting the tapes that were going
offsite from the tape Silo system.  No extra handling.  I did have to add a
step there to have TSM mark those tapes as OFSITE , that was it.   I then
would have my tape COPYPOOL use the OFFSITE9840 and the disk backuppoool
migrate to the TAPEPOOL that used the ONSITE9840.
            The problems that seem to come from this is TSM thinks it has
more tape drives than it does.  SO TSM may start to do a disk to tape
migration but it really doesn't have the tape drives available, yet (because
they are busy making OFFSITE copies of backups).   This of course makes
scheduling much more difficult.   And it has gotten ugly at times with
server consolidations and the fact that I am running in ROLLFORWARD mode
with version 4.1 and the 5GB log.  So I am wondering if my life would be
better if I really only defined to TSM the proper number of tape drives and
let it handle some of its scheduling affairs, and I wrote all the procedures
to handle the tapes coming and going affairs.  (which of course will change
the playing field for my schedules....)
          SO DO YOU SET UP YOUR TSM TAPE HANDLING ON OS390  z/OS LIKE THIS ?
Thanks
Matt