Administering Workload Manager

Workload Manager (WLM) gives system administrators more control over how the scheduler and the virtual memory manager (VMM) allocate resources to processes. Using WLM, you can prevent different classes of jobs from interfering with each other and you can allocate resources based on the requirements of different groups of users.

WLM lets you create different classes of service for jobs, as well as specify attributes for those classes. These attributes specify minimum and maximum amounts of CPU, physical memory, and disk I/O throughput to be allocated to a class. WLM then assigns jobs automatically to classes using class assignment rules provided by a system administrator. These assignment rules are based on the values of a set of attributes for a process. Either the system administrator or a privileged user can also manually assign jobs to classes, overriding the automatic assignment.

WLM is part of the base operating system and is installed with the base operating system, but it is an optional service. It must be configured to suit your system environment, started when you want to use it, and stopped when you want to suspend or end WLM service.

This section contains procedures for configuring WLM with classes and rules that are appropriate for your site and suggestions for troubleshooting unexpected resource consumption behavior.