Windows System Resource Manager

Windows System Resource Manager
Windows System Resource Manager
Developer(s)	Microsoft Corporation
Operating system	Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008
Available in	Multilingual
License	MS-EULA
Website	Microsoft Windows

Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is a component of Microsoft's Windows Server 2008/2003 operating systems that provides resource management and enables the allocation of resources, including processor and memory resources, among multiple applications based on business priorities. It is also available as a downloadable add-on for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter editions. WSRM is deprecated starting with Windows Server 2012. Microsoft recommends the use of Hyper-V as an alternative that provides similar functionality.^[1]

WSRM enables users to manage CPU and memory utilization on a per process basis. An administrator sets targets for the amount of hardware resources that running applications or users are allowed to consume. It can allocate resources among multiple applications on a server according to defined policies.

This can be helpful in a corporate environment when, for example, your well-behaved application software has to co-exist with an application that has a memory leak. Without protection such as afforded by WSRM, your application will run more slowly and/or crash, because the misbehaving application will eventually cause problems that affect every application that shares its memory space. Thanks to the WSRM, a software application can be limited to an isolated subset of hardware resources. As a result of this, the bad effects caused by the memory leak will be limited to that subset. Hardware partitioning can also solve the problem, but it is a far more complex solution.