Chapter Overview

The Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, serves as the central directing point for all space shuttle missions. Within the Mission Control Center is the Space Shuttle Flight Control Room. This room constitutes the base operations for the flight-control team, which consists of a wide variety of experts responsible for specific areas of the space shuttle's mission. As the leader of the flight control team, the flight director is responsible for the overall mission. The flight dynamics officer plans for the maneuvers of the craft and monitors the trajectory. The surgeon monitors the health of the crew and coordinates medical operations for the crew.^[1]

^[1] National Aeronautics and Space Administration, responsible official John Ira Petty, "Mission Control Center," available at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/mcc/index.html

HP's Global Workload Manager (gWLM) serves an analogous role for managing workloads in enterprise datacenters. Like the flight director in the Space Shuttle Flight Control Room, gWLM serves as the central directing point that monitors and manages workloads and their use patterns and allocates resources. In addition, it makes adjustments in workload resources just as the flight dynamics officer coordinates maneuvers and monitors trajectory of the space shuttle. Real-time reporting facilities in gWLM allow the health of workloads to monitored and reacted to immediately, just as the surgeon monitors the health of the crew.

Global Workload Manager is the second-generation workload management product in HP's Virtual Server Environment. Its predecessor is covered in Chapter 15, "Workload Manager." One of the most important differences between gWLM and WLM is the management model it uses. gWLM offers a centralized management strategy that allows a single console to be used to manage all of the workloads in the datacenter. Also, the configuration options have been greatly simplified and include default settings to ease the introduction of gWLM into new environments. Finally, gWLM offers a new advisory mode that provides a preview of the actions gWLM would take to allocate resources without actually making changes to the system.

This chapter begins by discussing the vocabulary used throughout this chapter and the gWLM documentation. Then it presents an overview of gWLM that describes its primary use models and architecture. The chapter ends with an example scenario demonstrating gWLM's capabilities. The first part of the example scenario demonstrates gWLM's abilities to migrate CPUs between two vPars based on the policies associated with each vPar. The second part of the example describes the process of using gWLM on the Linux operating system. Global Workload Manager is also supported on OpenVMS, but the example scenario does not illustrate the use of gWLM on OpenVMS.