Enabling Autonomic Adaption of Virtual Computational Environments in a Shared Distributed Infrastructure

A shared distributed infrastructure is formed by federating computation resources from multiple domains. Such shared infrastructures are increasing in popularity and are providing massive amounts of aggregated computation resources to large numbers of users. Meanwhile, virtualization technologies, at machine and network levels, are maturing and enabling mutually isolated virtual computation environments for executing arbitrary parallel/distributed applications on top of such a shared physical infrastructure. In this paper, we go one step further by supporting autonomic adaptation of virtual computation environments as active, integrated entities. More specifically, driven by both dynamic availability of infrastructure resources and dynamic application resource demand, a virtual computation environment is able to automatically re-locate itself across the infrastructure and scale its share of infrastructural resources. Such autonomic adaptation is transparent to both users of virtual environments and administrators of infrastructures, maintaining the look and feel of a stable, dedicated environment for the user. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a middleware system that we have called VIOLIN [10, 15] that is composed of a virtual network of virtual machines capable oflive migration across a multi-domain physical infrastructure . Department of Computer Science Technical Report CSD TR 06004, Purdue University, January 2006.