Coupling facility and the sysplex

Cross-system extended services (XES) uses one or more coupling facilities to satisfy customer requirements for:

Data sharing across the systems in a sysplex
Maintaining the integrity and consistency of shared data
Maintaining the availability of a sysplex.

A coupling facility is a special logical partition on System z and zEnterprise servers. The coupling facility allows software on different systems in the sysplex to share data. To share data, systems must have connectivity to the coupling facility through coupling facility links.

Systems in the sysplex that are using a coupling facility must also be able to access the coupling facility resource management (CFRM) couple data set. Managing coupling facility resources describes the coupling facility in detail.