The following terms are used throughout this chapter and the gWLM documentation.
Workload: a set of processes that can be identified by an executable, by the owning user name, or by the owning group name. Workloads are the level of granularity with which gWLM monitors the processes within the compartment and makes resource adjustments to ensure that the policy for the workload is being met. From a gWLM perspective, workloads reside within a single compartment. The supported compartment types are virtual partitions (vPars), processor sets (PSETs), and fair-share scheduler (FSS) groups.
Compartment: a vPar, an nPartition, a PSET, or a FSS group that is capable of being managed by gWLM. gWLM is capable of dynamically adjusting the resources assigned to a compartment in order to meet the policy associated with the workload that is running within the compartment. There is a one-to-one mapping between workloads and compartments.
Shared Resource Domain (SRD): the set of compartments over which gWLM is capable of managing resources to ensure that workload policies are met. If workloads are running within vPars, then the SRD is the set of vPars within the nPar or stand-alone server. If the workloads are running within PSETs or FSS groups, then the SRD is the set of PSETs or FSS groups running within the operating system.
Policy: contains the settings used by gWLM to allocate resources to the compartments that contain workloads. Policies can be defined to allocate a fixed amount of resources to a workload, or they can be defined to allocate a variable amount of resources that allows sharing between workloads.
Advisory Mode: allows administrators to see the requests gWLM would make on behalf of workloads in order to meet their policies. While running in advisory mode, gWLM makes no changes to the resources allocated to each compartment. Instead, this mode allows policy and workload definitions to be fine-tuned without affecting the system. After the settings are finalized, gWLM can be switched to managed mode.
Managed Mode: a mode gWLM uses to monitor workload utilization data and make adjustments to the resource allocations of the compartments. The mode for gWLM is specified for each SRD. Therefore, an entire SRD is either in managed or advisory mode.
Central Management Server (CMS): the station where the gWLM CMS daemon runs and where the user interface is hosted. The gWLM CMS daemon communicates with gWLM agent daemons that are running on every managed node under the control of gWLM. The gWLM managed node agent is responsible for monitoring workload utilization and reporting the information back to the gWLM CMS daemon.
