What is Control-M?
Control-M is an orchestration program from BMC Software. Orchestration can be used in IT to combine individual services into an overall service using so-called jobs and to generate structured scheduling of data workflows. A general goal is to automate and monitor an overall service.
What are resources used for?
Resources are used to control the parallel execution of jobs and/or to achieve a load distribution in the overall service. Resources can be used to define dependencies, particularly between jobs that are not directly connected to each other.
What resources are available?
Control Resources
On the one hand, there are the control resources, where you have to define a resource name and a type. An individual name can be assigned as the resource name. All jobs with the same resource name are assigned a dependency. The type of dependency of the jobs is defined by selecting the type. "Shared" and "Exclusive" are available. "Shared" means that several jobs with this resource name can run at the same time. With an exclusive configuration, only a single job with this resource name can be executed at any one time.
Quantitative Resources
On the other hand, there are also quantitative resources, where you first enter a resource name. In addition, a quantity (Resource Quantity) is set that this job should cost. If several jobs with the same resource name are running, the quantity defined in each case is added or subtracted again when a job is finished. If the total amount previously defined in the basic settings is reached, the following jobs with the same name wait until points become available again so that the total amount is never exceeded and load balancing is achieved with regard to the assigned quantities.
Examples from practice
Control Resources
A simple practical example is writing to and reading from a database. In order to obtain the data without gaps, it must first be loaded completely. This process should not take place simultaneously, as otherwise data may be lost. The job that writes to the database is therefore configured as Exclusive and may only be executed alone. The jobs that want to access the written data are set as Shared. This setting enables several jobs to access the written data at the same time. Shared and Exclusive jobs can never run in parallel.
Quantitative Resources
As previously mentioned, load balancing can be designed very well with Quantitative Resources. To prevent the systems from being overloaded, the jobs running in parallel can be reduced. As soon as a defined capacity limit is reached, the following jobs are placed in a queue.
