Considerations for automatic restart in a subplexing environment

When running the Load Balancing Advisor in a subplexing environment, there is one Load Balancing Advisor for each subplex that participates in load balancing. The subplex is determined by both the VTAM® and TCP/IP subplex group IDs, which are denoted by vv for VTAM and tt for TCP/IP. These subplex group IDs are reflected in the TCP/IP sysplex group name, which is of the format EZBTvvtt. Each Load Balancing Advisor registers with ARM with the following parameters:

   ELEMTYPE=SYSTCPIP
   ELEMNAME=EZBTvvttLBADV
   TERMTYPE=ALLTERM

You must define an ARM policy. For the EZBTvvttLBADV element name, you must specify the TARGET_SYSTEM keyword to indicate the systems on which the Advisor can be restarted. This ensures that the Load Balancing Advisor for a subplex is restarted only on a system that is in the same subplex. That is, it is restarted on a system that has a VTAM that was started with the same XCFGRPID (vv) and that has an available TCP/IP stack with the same XCFGRPID (tt).

In a subplexing environment, there must be one Load Balancing Agent per subplex that participates in load balancing on each z/OS® system. Each Load Balancing Agent registers with ARM with the following parameters:

   ELEMTYPE=SYSTCPIP
   ELEMNAME=EZBsysclonevvttLBAGENT
   TERMTYPE=ELEMTERM

where:

sysclone is a 1- or 2-character shorthand notation for the name of the MVS™ system. For a complete description of the SYSCLONE static system symbol, see z/OS MVS Initialization and Tuning Reference.
vvtt is the last 4 characters of the sysplex_group_name parameter in the Agent configuration file. If this parameter is not specified, vvtt is omitted.

For example, if the sysclone value is 02 and the sysplex_group_name is EZBTCPCS, the resulting ELEMNAME value is EZB02CPCSLBAGENT.

Requirement: When ARM registration is used, the started task IDs for each Agent and each Advisor must be permitted with UPDATE authority to the IXCARM.SYSTCPIP.elemname profiles in the FACILITY class in the SAF-compliant security product on your system. The elemname value is the EZBTvvttLBADV value or the EZBsysclonevvttLBAGENT value previously described. You can use the following RACF® commands to define the profiles and grant update access to the user IDs that are assigned to the Advisors and Agents. For each Advisor:

RDEFINE FACILITY IXCARM.SYSTCPIP.EZBTvvttLBADV UACC(NONE)
PERMIT IXCARM.SYSTCPIP.EZBTvvttLBADV CLASS(FACILITY) ID(advisor_userid) ACCESS(UPDATE) 
SETROPTS CLASSACT(FACILITY)

For each Agent:

RDEFINE FACILITY IXCARM.SYSTCPIP.EZBsysclonevvttLBAGENT UACC(NONE)  
PERMIT IXCARM.SYSTCPIP.EZBsysclonevvttLBAGENT CLASS(FACILITY) ID(agent_userid) ACCESS(UPDATE) 
SETROPTS CLASSACT(FACILITY)