AIX Workload Management (WLM) is designed to provide the system administrator increased control over how the scheduler and the virtual memory manager (VMM) allocate resources to processes. You can use WLM to prevent different classes of jobs from interfering with each other and to allocate resources based on the requirements of different groups of users.
WLM is primarily intended for use with large systems. Large systems are often used for server consolidation, in which workloads from many different server systems (such as printer, database, general user, and transaction processing systems)are combined into a single large system to reduce the cost of system maintenance. These workloads often interfere with each other and have different goals and service agreements.
WLM also provides isolation between user communities with very different system behaviors. This can prevent effective starvation of workloads with certain behaviors (for example, interactive or low CPU usage jobs) by workloads with other behaviors (for example, batch or high memory usage jobs).
WLM gives you the ability to create different classes of service for jobs, and specify attributes for those classes. These attributes specify minimum and maximum amounts of CPU and physical memory resources to be allocated to a class. You can then classify jobs automatically to classes using class assignment rules. These rules are based on the name of the user or group of the process or the pathname of the applications.