Autonomic virtual resource management for service hosting platforms

Cloud platforms host several independent applications on a shared resource pool with the ability to allocate computing power to applications on a per-demand basis. The use of server virtualization techniques for such platforms provide great flexibility with the ability to consolidate several virtual machines on the same physical server, to resize a virtual machine capacity and to migrate virtual machine across physical servers. A key challenge for cloud providers is to automate the management of virtual servers while taking into account both high-level QoS requirements of hosted applications and resource management costs. This paper proposes an autonomic resource manager to control the virtualized environment which decouples the provisioning of resources from the dynamic placement of virtual machines. This manager aims to optimize a global utility function which integrates both the degree of SLA fulfillment and the operating costs. We resort to a constraint programming approach to formulate and solve the optimization problem. Results obtained through simulations validate our approach.