Coupling facility for receiving commands from plurality of hosts for activating selected connection paths to I/O devices and maintaining status thereof

摘要

A message path mechanism in a network having central processing complexes (CPCs) joined by message paths to a coupling facility. The coupling facility locates message paths for sending messages from one CPC to another and for sending messages between the coupling facility and one or more of the CPCs. A message path status table is provided having an entry for each of the message paths. Each entry has an indicator indicating whether its message path is active or inactive. multiple connections between the coupling facility and systems in the CPCs are registered in the coupling facility. Also provided is a mechanism for validating that each message path is connected properly such that if a message path is disconnected and then reconnected to a CPC, the validation mechanism insures that the message path has been reconnected correctly.