[Info-vax] Workload manager for VMS, Should it come with one? (or at least a Scheduler?)

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Den 2017-07-29 kl. 14:34, skrev IanD:
> In the stone age we started with the VMS batch subsystem
> 
> Then evolved to scheduler tools, such as CA scheduler and DEC scheduler
> 
> The rest of the world has moved on to workload management systems now,
> even enterprise and across systems ones too
> 
> Then in VMS land we went backwards, DEC scheduler stopped running on
> newer versions of VMS probably some 10 years ago
> 
> Having to roll your own scheduler on VMS one is painful and often
> requires lots of DCL wrapper code just to get simplistic management
> happening. Relying upon an external scheduler like JAMS on another
> platform has issues too if one wants to go off the platform and onto
> another reservation!
> 
> It seems to me a fairly important aspect of an OS to have a native
> reliable scheduler system (a workload management would of course be even
> better) but in VMS land we at still at the evolution stage of pre-warp
> technology, i.e. batch jobs
> 
> The batch job entries are individualistic in nature, they are not
> associated with other entries and/or cannot be rolled up into separate
> classes etc making their management even more painful.
> 
> Should an OS like VMS come with a workload management system or at least
> a scheduler system that supports inter job dependencies and other such
> goodies?
> 
> Is the VMS vision to evolve to a system that will support workload
> management naively under some type of framework or are we distend to
> forever fight the job enemy with just the batch queue bow and arrow?
> 

I can understand that one might look for a tool with a lot of bells
and whistles, but for simple needs i have for many years used a port
of a "cron" like tool. It has a crontab.dat file that looks like the
equivalent file on a unix system. It is simple, but what I like is
that it is absolutely bullet-proof, it starts at boot and it never
needs any "management" apart from adding or removing a "job" in the
crontab.dat file.

It is better then to have re-submit commands in all jobs and all
periodic jobs are "ducumented" in one central text file.

Of course it doesn't have job-chains, dependencis and so on, but...


For something "better", the easiest route might be to try to get
DEC Scheduler back on track. The main problem might be that it
was sold of to CA...