SPARTAN WA: the perfect training for your WA environment

​Spartan was born as a race competition in the gritty green mountains of Vermont, for those with something more to prove.

​But it’s more than a competition, it’s a Way of Life, inspired by Spartans: Gritty. Resilient. Passionate. Spartans aren’t soft. Spartans overcome obstacles.

It’s also a community, a training program, a timed obstacle race and many other events.

 
Each performance requires dedicated training. This is true in every field. High-demanding performance requires intense focus and extreme training, both in sports and in workload automation.
 
Also, Workload Automation is more than just a scheduler: in the workload automation community you can find blog posts, news, resources and community events that will help you to get the best out of your product and to overcome daily obstacles or unexpected events.

​The key to overcome obstacles is to be prepared: on the Resources page you can find the Performance Reports to help you configure your environment to reach optimal performance.
No matter if your workload is a Sprint, Super or Beast race, every workload requires specific training tailored to your needs.
 
Sprint!
The Spartan Sprint, with more than 20 obstacles over 3 miles, is the starting point for athletes of all levels. It can be the starter distances for newbies or the perfect speed test for the advanced racers.
 
In the same way, Workload Automation needs to be prepared to support different levels of workloads. Within the 9.5 release, we have already configured the product to manage a basic workload (up to 10k jobs per day and up to 20 concurrent DWC users) after the installation. In fact, the majority of the recommended configurations documented in Chapter 5 of the “Workload Scheduler Version 9.4 Fix Pack 3 Performance Report” have been integrated as the default configuration for the 9.5 installation. You don’t need to do anything more to be ready to face your personal Spartan Sprint race.
 
Super
The Spartan Super, with its 25 obstacles over 8 miles, will put all of your endurance and strength to the test. A different and more specific training is also required to face a Spartan Super for your workload!

To support up to 100k jobs per day and up to 50-100 concurrent DWC users, you need to start with some specific tunings.

• Increase the heap memory up to 4 GB for both the master and the DWC as described in chapters 5.3 and 5.4.4 of the Performance Report.
• Tune the plan replication configuration parameters as described in chapter 5.4.2. The parameters and values described for 9.4 are still valid for 9.5, but are available in a new file path:

<TWA_DATA_DIR>/usr/servers/engineServer/resources/properties/TWSConfig.properties
 
While the workload increases in terms of the number of dynamic jobs executed per day, the dynamic domain manager historical tables increase accordingly. Data persistency in this table allows to perform job log retrieval for archived plans. You can tune these parameters as described in chapter 4.2 “Dynamic domain manager table cleanup policy” by updating the file: <TWA_DATA_DIR>/broker/config/JobDispatcherConfig.properties
 
Beast
The Spartan Beast is just plain hard. With 13 miles and more than 30 obstacles, it is the longest and most difficult race. The training required in this case is not only physical, but also involves mental preparation!
In the same way, if you have higher expectations from your environment, you will need to take care not only of the product, but also of the entire infrastructure and configuration of your environment.
 
To support up to 500k jobs per day and up to 150 concurrent DWC users, we recommend creating a 3-node topology (MDM, RDBMS and DWC running on different machines).
In addition, the heap size should be increased to 6 GB.
 
Finally, a peak of thousands of dynamic jobs per minute and a multitude of hundreds of thousand jobs per day requires dedicated configuration for disk and network latency (as detailed in the Report in chapter 5.2 for disk latency and chapter 3.4.4 for the network latency).
 
Train like a Spartan
As stated by Leonardo Da Vinci, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and we work every day to make everything easier!

If you are just starting out, your workload automation journey can start with ease, WA 9.5 has everything you need out of the box.

If you want additional support, or to take your preparations to the “next level,” the information provided in the 9.4 report is still valid for 9.5 but stay tuned,  a new report will be available soon.
 
No matter what workload you are preparing for, training and optimization will help you get the best from WA!
​

Enrica Pesare, UX Designer  
Connect with me on  LinkedIn 

Enrica is a UX Designer for the HCL Products and Platforms software development laboratory located in Rome, Italy. She is a Software Engineer in Quality Assurance for Workload Automation and is also the owner of the Workload Automation production environment. Currently, Enrica is part of the  UX  design team for Workload Automation. 

Alessandro Tomasi, Senior Technical Lead 
Connect with me on LinkedIn  
 
Alessandro is a Software Engineer. He has an academic background in Computer Engineering, in particular in technology customer support and automation testing. Alessandro wrote several patents and publications. He loves tech, sports, and has been member of the robocup during his schooling. He loves snowboarding and did several spartan races. Alessandro is currently based in the HCL Products and Platforms in Rome for the software development laboratory. 

Pier Fortunato Bottan, Software Engineer

Pier is a Software Engineer with long standing experience in software performance discipline. Pier has a degree in Physics and is currently based in the HCL Products and Platforms Rome software development laboratory.

Giorgio Corsetti, Technical Architect 

Giorgio works as Performance Test Engineer in the Workload Automation team. In his role, he works to identify bottlenecks in the architecture under analysis assessing how the overall system works managing specific loads and to increase customer satisfaction providing feedbacks about performance improvements when new product releases become available through technical documents publications. Starting from April 2018 he added a new responsibility covering the role of Test Architect for Workload Automation Products family. Giorgio has a degree in Physics and is currently based in the HCL Products and Platforms Rome software development laboratory.