In a sysplex environment an instance of the CICS® VR server address space must be installed and running on particular systems.
Only one instance of CICS VR can be active for each system.
Various tasks performed by the CICS VR server address space update the contents of the CICS VR Recovery Control Data Sets (RCDSs) allocated to the CICS VR server. The information in the RCDSs is then read by CICS VR during recovery job construction and processing. Therefore, to ensure data integrity of the RCDSs it might be desirable to logically group the CICS VR instances.
In this scenario, if a common VSAM sphere becomes corrupted, the updates made by batch jobs ran on both systems need to be recovered. Therefore, the same RCDSs must be allocated to both of the CICS VR instances in the sysplex. To enforce usage of the same RCDSs, CICS VR contains the CICSVR_GRPNAME_SUFFIX() parameter.
CICS VR ensures that all systems defined with the same CICS VR XCF group name suffix use the same set of RCDSs. Therefore, all CICS VR instances that either run batch jobs or notify CICS VR of backups created for common VSAM spheres must use the same CICS VR XCF group name.
Because CICS VR XCF groups operate independently of each other, CICS VR instances defined to a different CICS VR XCF group can use a different level of CICS VR.