- Improved response times
- Increased service availability
- Balanced resource usage
- Maintenance without interruption
Some of the unique benefits that this tool brings are:
- Multiple algorithms to choose from - round robin, weights, load factors, resource consumption, etc,. For example, you can specify a load factor for each CICS system allowing a balanced distribution of work
- Specify a maximum number of application servers available in each CICS system allowing better utilization of each CICS system
- Collects information about the AOR regions periodically; alternatively if there is any planned or unplanned shutdown of the CICS system it automatically informs the work load management component for not to route requests.
- Data based routing
- Upgrade / maintain regions without bringing down the entire cluster
- The AOR region configured can be a different CICS system such as CICS TS on z/OS
- A COR could be a single point of failure and as a result we need to configure multiple COR in the same environment.
- Multiple COR's in the same environment cannot share information of the AOR - so in effect COR1 will not be aware of the work load patterns of the AORs managed by COR2.
- Applications should be suitable to combine on one machine. For example, they cannot share the same TDQ names
- All required facilities or dependent components must be available; CICS systems must be cloned
- All required application data must be accessible; for example, accessing of database from the CICS system
- This is most important - Application must not contain any affinities. For example, dependence on state or data available on a particular CICS region
The tool can also help in building highly available solutions for TXSeries in an active-active configuration, as an alternative or in-conjunction with the HACMP environment for TXSeries. Overall the WLM tool provides a one-stop solution for managing workloads for TXSeries systems, including a web based administration of WLM components and simple-to-use configuration through the 'cicswlmcfg' master command.