HCL Workload Automation, Version 9.4

Managing the organization of the IT infrastructure

About this task

Two weeks before Christmas, the IT infrastructure administrator receives a notification from the scheduling analyst that an unplanned order adds so many tasks to a job stream in the critical path that its completion is delayed by a day. This causes a delay also in the completion of the plan scheduled to run the week before Christmas. The scheduling analyst advises him that he has already run the forecast plan and verified that with this addition the SLA for the job stream cannot be met and also the resources will become overloaded. To avoid this, concurrent jobs that need to use the same resource will need to wait until the requested quantity is available causing delay in the delivery of the order.

To find a solution to the potential problem and achieve the goals set for workload processing, without buying additional resources, using the dynamic domain manager, he proceeds in the following way:
  1. He performs an automatic discovery of the resources available in the scheduling domain with their characteristics and relationships.
  2. He finds a pool of resources in the Inventory department that meet the SLA to run the jobs. These resources have the required RAM, microprocessor, operating system, and application environments to run the new job stream and will be used at half their capacity during Christmas.

    Without the use of dynamic scheduling he could not adapt the new workload processing to match load requirements with business policies and priorities, and resource availability and capacity. The only way to solve the problem would be to buy new hardware to run the added job streams increasing the cost of IT management infrastructure without optimizing the use of the existing resources.

  3. He determines, based on the policies and jobs dispatching, how many new resources are required to run the new job stream.
  4. He manages the definition of business-oriented performance goals for the entire domain of servers, provides an end-to-end view of actual performance relative to those goals, and manages the server resource allocation and load to meet the performance goals.
  5. He identifies the required resources and finds an agreement with the Inventory department manager, to share the required resource between the two departments.
  6. He defines a new logical resource in which he outlines the machines that are shared between the departments.
  7. He communicates to the Ordering department the new agreement with the resource optimization.
  8. Now he can guarantee the running of jobs within the time frame according to policies, rules, and resources planned availability. In this way he can also satisfy the optimization policy to maximize resource utilization.
  9. The scheduling analyst now builds a feasible production plan.

    Using dynamic scheduling he met the constraints imposed by rules and policies and achieved SLA goals, optimizing execution time, throughput, cost, and reliability.