This page will help you do some important SYSGEN tuning that the VMS AUTOGEN utility fails to do. Follow these steps and calculations to improve your system performance.

Some VMS clusters, including mixed architecture VMS Clusters have multiple boot disks. This page helps you unify your cluster so that you have one User Authorization, Rights list, Network Proxy, and Queue Manager databases.

In VMS Clusters with multiple boot disks, the MAIL system also needs to be unified. This page helps you unify the mail system in a VMS Cluster.

Here are some recommendations to adding a node to your VMS Cluster. This description goes hand in hand with the description in the documentation, and gives you some hints that will help you manage your cluster easier in the future.

When adding a new node to your Cluster and/or Network, you should use the command procedure SYS$MANAGER:NETCONFIG.COM, but if you just follow the prompts you can easily screw up network MAIL, The PHONE Utility, Network file transfer and more. Read this page to avoid that problem. Also if you get a message saying "Login information invalid on remote node." with MAIL, PHONE or other network operations, we'll help you fix it.

This page provides you with instructions on how to implement an automated backup system for your site. It involves seven DCL command procedures which are available for download. This utility is currently in a Beta-Test version, but I hope you will try it and give me feedback on problems and enhancement requests. It is based on the system I currently use at my site, and has been doing backups for me for the past 7 years.

IF you have your own BACKUP procedure, or if you use the Automated Backup above, it is important to run your backup from a dedicated backup account that is tuned to maximize backup performance for the given resources of your system. This page helps you determine the process quotas and limits for such a dedicated account.

Sometimes you want to bring your Cluster down in a neat and orderly fashion. If you have a large Cluster with multiple boot nodes, and multiple CPU architectures, you may want to bring down certain groups of nodes one at a time. The VMS SYSMAN utility has the feature of using logical names to designate classes of nodes for shutdown or reboot, but this can cause problems if one or more nodes in a class is already down. This utility solves that problem and gives you more flexibility in shutting down your Cluster.