HP Process Resource Manager User's Guide

Overview
Why use HP Process Resource Manager?
Chapter 1 25
Reasons to use PRM:
• Improve the response time for critical users and applications.
• Set and manage user expectations for performance.
• Allocate shared servers based on budgeting.
• Ensure that an application package in a Serviceguard cluster has
sufficient resources on an active standby system in the event of a
failover.
• Ensure that critical users or applications have sufficient CPU,
memory, and disk bandwidth resources.
Users who at times run critical applications, may at other times
engage in relatively trivial tasks. These trivial tasks may be
competing in the users’ PRM group with critical applications for
available CPU and real memory resources. For this reason, it is often
useful to separate applications into different PRM groups or create
alternate groups for a user. You can assign a critical application its
own PRM group to ensure that the application gets the needed share
of resources.
• Restrict the CPU, real memory, and disk bandwidth resources
available to relatively low-priority users and applications during
times of heavy demand.
For example, mail readers can consume significant disk bandwidth
when users first come into work or return from lunch. Therefore, you
may want to assign an application like mail to a PRM group with
small resource allocations and restrict the amount of resources mail
can use during such times of heavy demand on the system.
• Monitor resource consumption by users or applications.
Assigning a group of users or applications to separate PRM groups
can be a good way to keep track of the resources they are using. For
information on various PRM reports, see “Monitoring PRM groups”
on page 184.
Table 1-1 lists the resources that PRM can manage. For more
information about how a resource is managed, see “Understanding how
PRM manages resources” on page 33.