Choice between partitioning and workload management

When making the choice between using partitions or using workload management for a particular set of workloads, applications, or solutions, there are several situations to consider.

Generally, partitioning is considered the more appropriate mode of management when the following are present:

• Application dependencies that require different versions or fix levels of the operating system.
• Security requirements that require different owners/administrators, strong separation of sensitive data, or distributed applications with network firewalls between them.
• Different recovery procedures, for example HA clustering and application failover or differing disaster recovery procedures.
• Strong isolation of failures is required so that application or operating system failures do not affect each other.
• Separation of performance is needed so that the performance characteristics of the work loads must not interfere with shared resources.

Separation of performance is important when you are monitoring or tuning application workloads on a system that supports partitioning. It can be challenging to establish effective AIX workload management controls when you are working in conjunction with other critical workloads at the same time. Monitoring and tuning multiple applications is more practical in separate partitions where granular resources can be assigned to the partition.