Workload management concepts

The service definition contains all information about the installation needed for workload management processing. There is one service definition for the entire sysplex. The service level administrator sets up policies within the service definition to specify the goals for work. He must understand how to organize work, and be able to assign performance objectives to it.

A service definition consists of:

• One or more service policies, which are a named set of performance goals that an installation tries to meet. You can have different policies to specify goals intended for different times. Service policies are activated by an operator command, or through the ISPF administrative application utility function.
• Workloads and service classes, which are the categories of work. A workload is a grouping of work in a way that is meaningful for your installation to manage and monitor. It is made up of a group of service classes. You assign performance goals and, optionally, capacity boundaries, to service classes.

  In addition, you can define report classes which will help you in your reporting with another granularity as being possible with service classes.

  The term workload group is also used in RMF™ documents and means the same as workload.

• Resource groups, which define processing capacity boundaries across the sysplex. You can assign a minimum and maximum number of CPU service units per second to work by assigning a resource group to a service class.
• Classification rules, which determine how to assign incoming work to a service class.