RE: IBM Workload Manager (WLM)

We are using Oracle on OS/390 and WLM.

If you are using AIX instead of MVS you will have a different flavour of WLM.

Basically each of our databases on the mainframe runs within a service (think of services on Windows NT). Each service is associated with a WLM class. Originally, we capped each class. This gave lousy performance. Then we decided to change priorities so all classes can compete equally with legacy applications and raised the cap on the machine itself. This has helped a lot.

It is the "Performance Group" that does all the configuration of WLM. On more than one occasion they misstated the configuration to us, when we asked how it was configured.

It only "kicks in" when there is a resource shortage. If you are using less resources than on the machine, WLM does nothing. It is when everything is requesting more resources than available in total, that resource allocation comes into effect.

• Babette

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 2003-12-29 4:14 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hi List,

Does anyone have experience in using IBM's Workload Manager together with Oracle?

I'm with a consulting client, where server-consolidation is intended. This involves appr. 180 Oracle databases. Some of them 1 instance/1 server, max. is now 22 instances/server. appr. No OPS is used. Versions: 7.3.4, 8.1.x. 60 servers are used now. Goal is to reduce the # of servers with 40-60%. Replacement of the server farm by a reduced number of high-end servers is one of the options, but starting with the consolidation process within the current range of servers is considered as well. All databases will be migrated to 8.1.7 before consolidation takes place. HW/OS is RS6000/AIX, both 4.3.3 and 5.2. Oracle 9i is still under investigation. Applications vvary from Peoplesoft to Siebel to tailor-made software. There is an in-house development department, so there are development, test and production databases. Servers have mixed use: I've seen servers running development, test AND production instances, not necessarily of the same application! Storage is EMC.

One of the ideas is using IBM's WLM to prevent the instances on 1 server damaging each others performance. Not to slice too small HW among too much instances, but to prevent one instance from grabbing too much recources on the cost of other instances.

>From IBM's doc's I got the following information: As from maintenance
level 8 on AIX 4.3.3, and on 5.2, WLM allows manual assignment of processes to classes. Before this feature classes could only be assigned based on program-name or username, which is not too useful for oracle. Explicit oracle examples are mentioned in the doc. Nice to know, but does this actually work?

Regards, Carel-Jan

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