Designing your scheduling environment

To begin working with HCL Workload Automation you must design your scheduling environment.

About this task

The scheduling environment is composed of the following items on distributed engines:

Workstations
Domains

To design your environment, you need to create workstations and domains. Depending on the business needs of your organization and the complexity of your network, you can decide to have a hierarchical domain structure.

To create a scheduling environment perform the following actions.

Creating a workstation

About this task

You can create multiple workstation definitions.

For more information about the main workstation types and their attributes, see Workstation.

To add a workstation definition to the database and to assign it to a domain, perform the following procedure.

Note: For all the details about options and fields displayed in the panels, see the online help by clicking the question mark located at the top-right corner of each panel.

Procedure

From the Design menu, click Graphical Designer page.
Select a engine from the list.
Go to the Assets tab, click the + icon, and from the drop-down menu select Workstation.
In the workstations properties panel, specify the attributes for the workstation you are creating.
1. In a distributed environment, depending on the type of workstation you select, some attributes are mandatory.
2. In a z/OS environment, specify the workstation attributes using the General, Resources, and Open Time Intervals tabs as appropriate. Depending on the type of workstation you select, some attributes are mandatory.
To assign the workstation to an existing domain:
1. Go to the Domain field.
2. Select the domain from the available domains, or click View all and search for the required domain.
3. Click the Add button at the end of the properties panel.

Results

The workstation is now added to the database.

Note: You can add workstation definitions to the database at any time, but you must run JnextPlan -for 0000 to add the workstation definition to the plan, so that you can run jobs on this workstation. For dynamic agent workstation definitions, if you have the enAddWorkstation global option set to "yes", the workstation definitions are automatically added to the plan after they are defined in the database.

What to do next

You can also edit and manage workstation and domain definitions.

To edit a workstation definition in the database and to assign it to a domain, perform the following steps.

From the Graphical Designer page, select the Assets tab, expand the Workstation section and search for the workstation definition that you want to edit. You can also use the search bar to find the workstation definition to edit.
Click on the three-dot menu next to the workstation definition and click edit.
Change workstation information in the properties panel and click Save.

To add a new domain definition, perform the following steps:

From the Design menu, click Graphical Designer page.
Select an engine from the list.
Go to the Assets tab, click the + icon and select Domain.
In the properties panel that appears on the right, specify domain information.
Click Add at the end of the properties panel.

Creating a pool of agents

Creating distributed workstation definitions in the HCL Workload Automation database.

About this task

You can define and schedule dynamic jobs to perform application specific operations, such as database, file transfer, Java, and Web Services operations. You can customize the sample files provided with the product to match the requirements of your environment.

To run these job types, you can use dynamic agents, a workstation type that you create by running the related installation process. The dynamic agents are automatically created and registered at installation time. You can also organize the dynamic agents into groups, called pools or dynamic pools.

To add this kind of workstation definition to the database and to assign it to a domain, perform the following steps.

Note: For all the details about options and fields displayed in the panels, expand the contextual help placed at the bottom of the properties panel.

Procedure

From the Design menu, click Graphical Designer page.
Select an engine from the list and create a new Workstation.
Go to the Assets tab, click the + icon, and from the drop-down menu select Workstation.
In the workstations properties panel, in general information, specify the attributes for the pool of dynamic agents you are creating. In the Type drop-down menu, select Pool or Dynamic Pool, depending on the set of dynamic agents you are defining.
- Select Pool to define a cluster of dynamic agents with similar hardware or software characteristics to submit jobs to. Then, in the Pool section of the properties panel that displays the dynamic agents that belong to the pool, click Add worskation to add new dynamic agents or select the bin icon to remove unwanted dynamic agents.
  When dynamic agents are added to a pool, the agent is registered with the pool and this registration is written to the pools.properties file located in TWS_home/ITA/cpa/config. As an alternative method, you can add dynamic agents to a pool by directly editing this file.
- Select Dynamic Pool to define a set of dynamic agents that is dynamically defined based on the resource requirements you specify. In Requirements field, you can specify the requirements necessary for running your jobs. All your selections produce an XML file, which is used to select a workstation with the characteristics you require, to run Workload Broker jobs. When you provide the requirements, you specify a list of workstation candidates to be included in the Dynamic Pool of dynamic agents and the preferred order in which they must be considered. You also specify the best criteria, which is used to change the workstation (workload balance, CPU utilization, or its use of logical resources).
Optionally, you can associate the new pool to a variable table.
Specify the Workload Broker hosting the workstation.