The Pioneer drive simplifies this by automatically changing disks whenever a disk is accessed. In a multi-user OpenVMS environment, this will cause severe performance problems and even system crashes on some hardware. As the OpenVMS device driver attempts to access more than one disk at the same time, the drive will begin to thrash, spending all of its time swapping disks and none of it reading data. By arbitrating between accesses to different disks, Virtual Branches keeps the disk drive from thrashing and the operating system from crashing. Because Acorn is aiming at the higher-end market, they haven't paid much attention to the smaller changers.
Configuration is another story entirely.
We found the manual incomprehensible and incomplete. Until Acorn redesigns their manuals, plan on having them walk you through the configuration. What should have been a fifteen minute job ended up taking much longer. Once we got Virtual Branches up and running, it performed flawlessly in a single-system environment. Then, we set up multiple jobs on the same system attempting to access multiple disks in the changer.