AIX Workload Management (WLM) is designed to give system administrators more control over how the scheduler and the virtual memory manager (VMM) allocate resources to processes. This can be used 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 gives you the ability to create different classes of service for jobs, and specify attributes for those classes. These attributes specify minimum, optimum and maximum amounts of CPU and physical memory to be allocated to a class. The system administrator also defines class assignment rules used by WLM to assign jobs automatically to classes. These rules are based upon the name of the user or group of the process or the pathname of the applications.
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).