Policy transformation techniques in policy-based systems management

Policy based systems management provides a means for administrators, end-users and application developers to manage and dynamically change the behavior of computing systems. One advantage of policy-based management is that it simplifies and automates the administration of IT environments. A significant part of the simplification is obtained by allowing the system administrator to specify only the objectives or goals that are to be met, rather than having to specify detailed configuration parameters for each of the different devices in the system. It may not be obvious to the administrator how the goals can be achieved without having to know the internals of the system. This knowledge thus needs to be captured in the policy driven actions. The existing algorithms for mapping policy objectives to specific configuration details tend to be specific to each policy discipline. This makes the policy-based approach harder to deploy for new disciplines. In this paper, we address different types of policy transformations and propose methods, which are not discipline specific for mapping objectives to system configurations.