Workload manager

Workload Manager (WLM) is designed to provide the system administrator with increased control over how the scheduler virtual memory manager (VMM) and the disk I/O subsystem allocate resources to processes.

You can use WLM to prevent different classes of jobs from interfering with each other and to allocate resources based on the requirements of different groups of users.

WLM is primarily intended for use with large systems. Large systems are often used for server consolidation, in which workloads from many different server systems (such as printer, database, general user, and transaction processing systems) are combined into a single large system to reduce the cost of system maintenance. These workloads often interfere with each other and have different goals and service agreements.

WLM also provides isolation between user communities with very different system behaviors. This can prevent effective starvation of workloads with certain behaviors (for example, interactive or low CPU usage jobs) by workloads with other behaviors (for example, batch or high memory usage jobs).

Also, WLM ties into the accounting subsystem allowing users to do resource usage accounting per WLM class in addition to the standard accounting per user or group.