Appliance-Based Autonomic Provisioning Framework for Virtualized Outsourcing Data Center

As outsourcing data centers emerge to host applications or services from many different organizations and companies, it is critical for data center owners to isolate different applications while dynamically and optimally allocate resources among them. To address this problem, we propose a virtual-appliance-based autonomic resource provisioning framework for large virtualized data centers. Firstly, we present the architecture of the data center with enriched autonomic features. Secondly, we define a non-linear constrained optimization model for dynamic resource provisioning and present its novel analytic solution. Key factors including virtualization overhead and reconfiguration delay are incorporated into the model. Experimental results based on a prototype system demonstrate that system-level performance has been greatly improved by taking advantage of fine-grained server consolidation. Experiments with the impact of switching delay also show the efficiency of the framework through significantly reducing provisioning time.