In the MVS environment, a Parallel Sysplex® is a collection of systems linked by closely coupled hardware facilities to process customer workloads. SMS system group name support allows you to specify a system group as a member of an SMS complex.

In SMS, the term system group is used instead of Parallel Sysplex. A system group consists of system names within a Parallel Sysplex, excluding those systems that are individually specified in the SMS base configuration. A system group name can represent multiple systems. This allows SMS to support more than eight systems per SMS complex while retaining the existing configuration format of the configuration data set.

Object storage groups, object backup storage groups, and optical libraries do not support system groups. If you have object storage groups, object backup storage groups or optical libraries in your configuration, the systems where they are to be enabled must be specified as individual system names.

The system group name represents all the systems in the Parallel Sysplex which are not explicitly specified in the SCDS base configuration.

Figure 1 provides a visual representation of the system grouping concept.

Figure 1. System Grouping Concept

In Figure 1, the SMS complex view shows that it is managing sys 1 and sys 4 as single systems, and Maui as a Parallel Sysplex. (sys 5 is not part of the SMS complex.)

The Parallel Sysplex (Maui) contains three system names: sys 1, sys 2, and sys 3. The single systems sys 1 and sys 4, as well as the Parallel Sysplex (Maui) are all defined in the SCDS. If you perform an SMS operation on Maui, it affects only sys 2 and sys 3 in the Parallel Sysplex. It does not affect sys 1 because it is defined separately in the SCDS.

In this example, the system group (sys 2 and sys 3) is represented by the Parallel Sysplex name, Maui.