Exploiting semantics and virtualization for SLA-driven resource allocation in service providers

Resource management is a key challenge that service providers must adequately face in order to accomplish their business goals. This paper introduces a framework, the semantically enhanced resource allocator (SERA), aimed to facilitate service provider management, reducing costs and at the same time fulfilling the QoS agreed with the customers. The SERA assigns resources depending on the information given by the service providers according to its business goals and on the resource requirements of the tasks. Tasks and resources are semantically described and these descriptions are used to infer the resource assignments. Virtualization is used to provide an application specific and isolated virtual environment for each task. In addition, the system supports fine-grain dynamic resource distribution among these virtual environments based on Service-Level Agreements. The required adaptation is implemented using agents, guarantying enough resources to each task in order to meet the agreed performance goals. Copyright (c) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.