My employer is planning to migrate our computing infrastructure to a pair of new data centers, each with a Version 6 TSM server running under mainframe Linux, each writing copy pool volumes on tape drives at the other site, and each with a library manager instance of TSM to control sharing of tape drives and volumes between local and remote TSM servers.
The original plan was to develop both new data centers concurrently. In order to spread out the spending, a recent change in plans calls for a transitional stage with one of the new data centers writing copy pool volumes to our current data center, which has a TSM 5.4 server under mainframe Linux. Adding a mainframe library manager instance to the current data center is problematic. The library manager will need to be at Version 6, because the new data center will have a Version 6 server and a library manager client cannot be at a higher level than the library manager. It is nearly impossible to have two different levels of TSM server code coexist on the same Linux image. We do not have zVM, and carving another LPAR out of our aging and fairly small mainframe is not an appealing prospect. Am I correct in understanding that a library manager can run on a different platform than its clients? Would there be any problem with setting up a Version 6 library manager under x86 Linux running in a virtual machine? We already have a sizable x86 virtualization infrastructure. The tape library at the current data center is an IBM 3494 that receives mount and dismount requests via Ethernet.
