When to Use Resource Management

Use resource management to ensure that your applications have the required response times.

Resource management can also increase resource utilization. By categorizing and prioritizing usage, you can effectively use reserve capacity during off-peak periods, often eliminating the need for additional processing power. You can also ensure that resources are not wasted because of load variability.

Server Consolidation

Resource management is ideal for environments that consolidate a number of applications on a single server.

The cost and complexity of managing numerous machines encourages the consolidation of several applications on larger, more scalable servers. Instead of running each workload on a separate system, with full access to that system's resources, you can use resource management software to segregate workloads within the system. Resource management enables you to lower overall total cost of ownership by running and controlling several dissimilar applications on a single Solaris system.

If you are providing Internet and application services, you can use resource management to do the following:

• Host multiple web servers on a single machine. You can control the resource consumption for each web site and you can protect each site from the potential excesses of other sites.

• Prevent a faulty common gateway interface (CGI) script from exhausting CPU resources.

• Stop an incorrectly behaving application from leaking all available virtual memory.

• Ensure that one customer's applications are not affected by another customer's applications that run at the same site.

• Provide differentiated levels or classes of service on the same machine.

• Obtain accounting information for billing purposes.

Supporting a Large or Varied User Population

Use resource management features in any system that has a large, diverse user base, such as an educational institution. If you have a mix of workloads, the software can be configured to give priority to specific projects.

For example, in large brokerage firms, traders intermittently require fast access to execute a query or to perform a calculation. Other system users, however, have more consistent workloads. If you allocate a proportionately larger amount of processing power to the traders' projects, the traders have the responsiveness that they need.

Resource management is also ideal for supporting thin-client systems. These platforms provide stateless consoles with frame buffers and input devices, such as smart cards. The actual computation is done on a shared server, resulting in a timesharing type of environment. Use resource management features to isolate the users on the server. Then, a user who generates excess load does not monopolize hardware resources and significantly impact others who use the system.