Massive Deployment of Management Agents in Virtual Data Centers

The starting point for this work was: What would be the implications when systems and with them their management systems would become two orders of magnitude larger then they are today? We focus on one problem: How management agents can be automatically deployed in massive amounts (>>10) providing the infrastructure for management and control systems of large-scale virtual data center environments? Management agents perform tasks such as monitoring, processing and dissemination of management and control data, decision-making and actuation. Under deployment we understand the processes of software distribution, installation and configuration assuming a hierarchical organization of agents. Three main areas are discussed: a deployment infrastructure with its components, the automated deployment process with protocols and a recursive generation method which allows the deployment of massive amounts of management agents. The principles presented in this paper can be generalized for common services.