Multifaceted resource management for dealing with heterogeneous workloads in virtualized data centers

As long as virtualization has been introduced in data centers, it has been opening new chances for resource management. Now, it is not just used as a tool for consolidating underused nodes and save power, it also allows new solutions to well-known challenges, such as fault tolerance or heterogeneity management. Virtualization helps to encapsulate Web-based applications or HPC jobs in virtual machines and see them as a single entity which can be managed in an easier way. This paper proposes a new scheduling policy to model and manage a virtualized data center which mainly focuses on the allocation of VMs in data center nodes according to multiple facets while optimizing the provider’s profit. In particular, it considers energy efficiency, virtualization overheads, fault tolerance, and SLA violation penalties, while adding the ability to outsource resources to external providers. Using our approach, a data center can improve the provider’s benefit by 15% and get a power reduction while solving well-known challenges, such as fault tolerance and outsourcing, in a better a more intuitive way that typical approaches do.