Virtualization Support for SLA-Driven Resource Distribution within Service Providers

Resource management is a key challenge that service providers must adequately face in order to ensure their profitability. This paper describes a proof-of-concept framework for facilitating resource management in service providers, which allows reducing costs and at the same time fulfilling the quality of service agreed with the customers. This is accomplished by means of virtualization, by providing application specific virtual environments and consolidating them in order to achieve a better utilization of the providers resources. In addition, our approach implements self-adaptive capabilities for dynamically distributing the providers resources among these virtual environments based on Service Level Agreements. The proposed solution has been implemented as a part of the SemanticallyEnhanced Resource Allocator prototype developed within the BREIN European project. The evaluation demonstrates that our prototype is able to react under changing conditions and avoid SLA violations by rescheduling efficiently the resources.