Workload management (WLM) for z/OS

Workload management optimizes the distribution of incoming work requests to the application servers, enterprise beans, servlets, and other objects that can most effectively process the requests. Workload management also provides failover when servers are not available, improving application availability.

For details on workload management, see z/OS MVS Planning: Workload Management, which is available on the z/OS Internet Library website. You might also find z/OS MVS Programming: Workload Management Services helpful.

When you are using workload management on z/OS, you can define workload management policies for your application servers. To get started, you do not need to define special classification rules and work qualifiers, but you might want to define them for your production system.

Workload management provides the following benefits to applications that are running on an application server:

• It balances server workloads, allowing processing tasks to be distributed according to the capacities of the different machines in the sysplex.
• It provides failover capability by redirecting client requests if one or more servers is unable to process them. This improves the availability of applications and administrative services.
• It enables systems to be scaled up to serve a higher client load than provided by the basic configuration. With clustering, additional instances of servers, servlets, and other objects can easily be added to the configuration.
• It enables servers to be transparently maintained and upgraded while applications remain available for users.
• It centralizes the administration of servers and other objects.

In the product environment, you implement workload management by using clusters, transports, and replication domains.