VTAM® is at restart level 1, the same as DB2® and DBCTL. However, VTAM is not restarted when failed subsystems are being restarted on another MVS™, because ARM expects VTAM to be running on all MVS images in the sysplex. For this reason, CICS® and VTAM are not generally part of the same restart group.
In a VTAM network, the session between CICS and VTAM is started automatically if VTAM is started before CICS. If VTAM is not active when you start (or restart) CICS, you receive the following messages:
+DFHSI1589D 'applid' VTAM is not currently active.
+DFHSI1572 'applid' Unable to OPEN VTAM ACB - RC=xxxxxxxx, ACB CODE=yy.
CICS provides a new transaction, COVR, to open the VTAM ACB automatically when VTAM becomes available. See The COVR transaction for more information about this.
To ensure that CICS reconnects to VTAM in the event of a VTAM abend, CICS keeps retrying the OPEN VTAM ACB using a time-delay mechanism via the non-terminal transaction COVR. After CICS has completed clean-up following the VTAM failure, it invokes the CICS open VTAM retry (COVR) transaction. The COVR transaction invokes the terminal control open VTAM retry program, DFHZCOVR, which performs an OPEN VTAM retry loop with a 5-second wait. CICS issues a DFHZC0200 message every minute, while the open is unsuccessful, and each attempt is recorded on the CSNE transient data queue. After ten minutes, CICS issues a DFHZC0201 message and terminates the transaction. If CICS shutdown is initiated while the transaction is running, CICS issues a DFHZC0201 message and terminates the transaction.
You cannot run the COVR transaction from a terminal. If you invoke COVR from a terminal, it abends with an AZCU transaction abend.
There are some CICS messages for ARM support, which CICS can issue during startup if problems are encountered when CICS tries to connect to ARM.
The message numbers are:
DFHKE0401 | DFHKE0407 |
DFHKE0402 | DFHKE0408 |
DFHKE0403 | DFHKE0410 |
DFHKE0404 | DFHKE0411 |
DFHKE0405 | DFHZC0200 |
DFHKE0406 | DFHZC0201 |
For the text of these messages, see the CICS Messages and Codes manual.
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