Using policies to drive autonomic management of virtual systems

Virtualization is essential to cloud computing as it can provide the means for flexible, reliable and manageable computing resources. At the same time, it raises new challenges for system management, including resource allocation for virtual machines (VMs), means for providing quality of service for applications, meeting organizational objectives, etc. This paper explores the use of policies to drive the autonomic management of virtualization systems. We describe an architecture for autonomically managing VMs and the applications running on those VMs based on policies, outline a prototype implementation and present present an analysis of its performance.