Managing dynamic scheduling capabilities in your environment
This section explains how you can manage dynamic scheduling capabilities in your environment to schedule both existing HCL Workload Automation jobs and job types with advanced options, both those supplied with the product and the additional types implemented through the custom plug-ins.
- Automatically discovering scheduling environment resources
- Matching job requirements to available resources
- Controlling and optimizing use of resources
- Automatically following resource changes
- Requesting additional resources when needed
- Dynamic agent
- A workstation that manages a wide variety of
job types, for example, specific database or FTP jobs, in addition
to existing job types. This workstation is automatically defined and
registered in the HCL Workload Automation database
when you install the dynamic agent.
You can group dynamic agents in
pools and dynamic pools.
In a simple network, dynamic agents connect directly to its master domain manager or through a dynamic domain manager. In more complex network topologies where the master domain manager or the dynamic domain manager cannot directly communicate with the dynamic agent, you can configure your dynamic agents to use a local or remote gateway.
- Pool
- A workstation that groups a
set of dynamic agents with similar hardware
or software characteristics to which to submit jobs. HCL Workload Automation balances the jobs among the dynamic agents within the pool and automatically
reassigns jobs to available dynamic agents
if a dynamic agent is no longer available.
To create a pool of dynamic agents in your
HCL Workload Automation environment, define a
workstation of type pool hosted by the workload broker workstation, then select the dynamic agents you want to add to the pool. You can
define the pool using the Dynamic Workload Console or
the composer command.
You can also register an agent with
a pool by directly editing the pools.properties file located in
<TWS_home>/ITA/cpa/config. See
Automatically register agents to pools for more details.
See the topic about automatically registering agents to a pool in the Planning and Installation.
- Dynamic pool
- A
workstation that groups a set of dynamic agents,
which is dynamically defined based on the resource requirements you
specify and hosted by the workload broker workstation.
For example, if you require a workstation with low CPU usage and Windows
installed to run your job, you specify these requirements using the Dynamic Workload Console or
the composer command. When you save the set of requirements,
a new workstation is automatically created in the HCL Workload Automation database.
This workstation is hosted by the workload broker workstation.
This workstation maps all the dynamic agents in
your environment that meet the requirements you specified. The resulting
pool is dynamically updated whenever a new suitable dynamic agent becomes
available. Jobs run on the first workstation in the dynamic pool which
marches all the requirements. Jobs scheduled on this workstation automatically
inherit the requirements defined for the workstation.
For information about how to create pools and dynamic pools using the Dynamic Workload Console, see
The dynamic agents, pools, and dynamic pools leverage the dynamic functionality built into HCL Workload Automation and provide the possibility at run time to dynamically associate your submitted workload (or part of it) to the best available resources. You can enable dynamic scheduling capabilities to workstations at installation time. For more information about installing the dynamic agents, see the section on installing a new agent in the Planning and Installation Guide, SC32-1273.
You can use dynamic agents, pools and dynamic pools to schedule job types with advanced options. The job types with advanced options include both those supplied with the product and the additional types implemented through the custom plug-ins. Both job types run only on dynamic agents, pools, and dynamic pools. For more information about how to schedule job types with advanced options, see Creating advanced job definitions. For more information about how to create custom plug-ins, see Extending HCL Workload Automation.
You can also use dynamic agents, pools, and dynamic pools to run the jobs you created for the existing HCL Workload Automation workstation types. To run these jobs on the dynamic workstation types, you only have to change the specification of the workstation where you want the job to run. For more information about how to schedule existing HCL Workload Automation jobs, see Adding dynamic capabilities to existing HCL Workload Automation jobs.
If you want to leverage the dynamic capability when scheduling job types with advanced options, you schedule them on pools and dynamic pools, which assign dynamically the job to the best available resource. If you are interested only in defining job types with advanced options, without using the dynamic scheduling capability, you schedule these jobs on a specific dynamic agent, on which the job runs statically.