The Provisioning Manager controls a domain. It monitors the observed systems and can provision or propose manual provisioning of capacity, based on the settings in your active domain configuration and policy.
The specifications of the CPCs to be managed and the systems to be observed are included in a domain configuration. The Provisioning Manager must be able to access these CPCs from every host system it runs on. Information from available CPCs is obtained through a connection to the hardware console. This console can be a service element (SE) or a hardware management console (HMC).
Management of the domain is controlled by a policy that specifies the time conditions when capacity can be provisioned, optionally specifies the workload conditions that can trigger provisioning, and finally specifies the capacity that can be provisioned under these conditions.
Domain configurations are part of a domain configuration repository, and policies are located in a policy repository. Because these repositories can contain more than one domain configuration or policy, each configuration or policy must be given a unique name. At any given time, only one configuration and one policy can be active in the domain. See Defining the runtime data sets for more information about repository files.
The Provisioning Manager operates in any one of four processing modes, each with varying powers of autonomy. These modes are described in detail on page Processing modes.
Only capacity that was provisioned by the Provisioning Manager is managed by the Provisioning Manager. Capacity that is activated manually, either by using Provisioning Manager commands or by using the interfaces available on the HMC, is not managed by the Provisioning Manager. Nevertheless, you have the option to pass manually provisioned capacity to the Provisioning Manager for deprovisioning of that capacity.