The Dimensions of Service - Exploring WLM's Solution Space

The behavior of a WLM-managed MVS system is sometimes best understood by looking at the goals rather than the workloads. A WLM goal occupies a space of many dimensions. The system administrator is free to burden the goal with an assortment of workloads, assign it a high or low importance, and set it a target that is somewhere between lenient and stringent. In execution, the goal may be met well or poorly, at a cost that may be cheap or dear. In this paper, we consider WLM’s metrics and present several maps to facilitate navigation through its multi-dimensional space.