Configuring workload management

CICSPlex® SM workload management optimizes processor capacity in your enterprise by dynamically routing transactions and programs to whichever CICS® region is the most appropriate at the time, taking into account any transaction affinities that exist.

Before you begin

  1. Ensure that you are familiar with the concepts involved with workload management and the dynamic routing of transactions and programs. For details, see Workload management.
  2. You have determined the extent to which you can use CICSPlex SM workload management in your enterprise. This includes identifying the workloads processed in your enterprise and inter-transaction affinities. Follow the instructions in Planning for WLM.
  3. Ensure that you follow the implementation process described in Implementing WLM.

About this task

When you establish a workload, you are associating the work itself and the CICS systems (acting as requesting, routing, and target regions), to form a single, dynamic entity. Within this entity, you can route the work:
  • To a target region selected on the basis of its availability. This type of routing, known as workload balancing, allows you to balance work activity across all of the target regions associated with a workload. See Management of the work in a workload for additional information.
  • To a subset of the target regions based on specific criteria. This type of routing, known as workload separation, allows you to separate transaction and program occurrences and direct them to different target region subsets, where activity is balanced across the target regions within the subset.
    The criteria you use to separate transactions or programs can be based on:
    • The terminal ID and user ID associated with a transaction or program occurrence.
    • The process type associated with the CICS BTS activity.
    • The transaction.
    See Separating the work in a workload for additional information.
  • To a selected target region based on its affinity relationship and lifetime. This type of routing, based on the transaction affinity of the target region, allows you to route specific transaction occurrences to the same target region for a designated period of time. For additional information, see Taking affinity relations into consideration.
Workload routing and workload separation can be active concurrently in the same or different workloads associated with a CICSplex.
Note:
  1. You can use the CICSPlex SM real-time analysis functions to produce data that will help in the selection of a target region during workload management, as demonstrated in this example. However, CICSPlex SM Workload Manager (WLM) health is assessed independently and does not require RTA to be active. CICSPlex SM WLM health is not influenced by SAM settings either.
  2. For additional information about how CICSPlex SM handles dynamic routing and how you can customize this facility, see Dynamic routing with CICSPlex SM.