Similar to but independent from member affinity, a job may also be assigned a “scheduling environment” to ensure it executes on the members in the MAS which have the required resources, or specific environmental states. The states may be associated with hardware resources such as a vector facility, an address space such as DB2®, or an abstract state such as time of day (shift) or day of the week. The environment can be specified with the SCHENV= keyword parameter on the JOB statement, or through an installation exit. They can also be assigned by a JOBCLASS default or using the $T Job JES2 command. Scheduling environments are installation-defined 16-character names which may be available on any of the MVS™ systems in the sysplex, or may be available on none of the systems.

Use workload management to define the scheduling environments and make them available or unavailable on each system, based on the “ON” or “OFF” state of resources.

The scheduling environment is validity-checked by the converter and must be defined to workload management, or else the jobs will fail with a JCL error. JES2 detects the availability of scheduling environments on each member, and allows an initiator to select jobs only if the specified scheduling environment is available. This is true for both JES2-managed initiators and WLM-managed initiators. In addition, any member affinity specified through the SYSAFF= parameter as well as the job class and initiator class must match.

For more information on the definition and control of scheduling environments, see z/OS MVS Planning: Workload Management.