Workload Manager: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:42, 8 October 2009

Revision as of 15:40, 23 July 2010

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WLM is a closed control mechanism which continuously collects data about the work and system resources; compares the collected and aggregated measurements with the user definitions from the service definition and adjusts the access of the work to the system resources if the user expectations have not been achieved. This mechanism runs continuously in pre-defined time intervals. In order to compare the collected data with the goal definitions a performance index is calculated.

[[Image:PI02.jpg|thumb|400px|Definition of Performance Index|left]] The performance index for a service class is a single number which tells whether the goal definition could be met, has been overachieved or was missed. WLM modifies the access of the service classes based on the achieved performance index and importance. For this it uses the collected data to project the possibility and result of a change. The change is executed if the forecast comes to the result that it is beneficial for the work based on the defined customer expectations. It should be noted that WLM uses a data base ranging from 20 seconds to 20 minutes to contain a statistically relevant basis of samples for its calculations. Also in one decision interval a change is performed for the benefit of one service class to maintain a controlled and predictable system.

WLM controls the access of the work to the system processors, the I/O units, the system storage and starts and stops processes for work execution. The access to the system processors for example is controlled by a dispatch priority which defines a relative ranking between the units of work which want to execute. The same dispatch priority is assigned to all units of work which were classified to the same service class. As already stated the dispatch priority is not fixed and not simply derived from the importance of the service class. It changes based on goal achievement, system utilization and demand of the work for the system processors. Similar mechanisms exist for controlling all other system resources. This way of z/OS Workload Manager controlling the access of work to system resources is named goal oriented workload management and is in contrast to resource entitlement based workload management which defines a much more static relationship how work can access the system resources. Resource entitlement based workload management is found on larger [[UNIX]] operating systems for example.