When a coupling facility resource management (CFRM) policy with a VTAM® structure is activated, VTAM is notified and connects to the structure. A structure policy can be changed or activated before or after VTAM is active. VTAM attempts to connect to a VTAM coupling facility structure when it detects that a structure has been defined. For the TCP/IP functions, VTAM does not attempt to connect to the structure associated with that function until a TCP/IP stack requests access to the structure. Before a VTAM node attempts to connect to the coupling facility structure, it first checks to see that it is running on a version of MVS™ that supports the coupling facility and that the coupling facility structure is defined to the active CFRM policy. The first VTAM node to connect to a structure causes the allocation of storage for the structure within a coupling facility and also defines the structure attributes associated with the structure.