On Virtual Data Centers and Their Operating Environments

data center, virtual data center, operating environment, e-service, services, servers, service monitoring and management The business and enterprise computing infrastructures are consolidating into data centers in order to improve the access control, increase security and reduce the maintenance costs. Big corporations or e-service providers span their data and applications over several data centers, combining their resources into virtual data centers. There may be many layers of virtualization in general case. At the bottom are platform centers that provide "physical" computing resources and logistics, such as computer platforms, basic software, databases, and network capabilities. At the top are e-service centers that face end customers and are specialized in providing specific e-services to the customers. Virtual centers that serve as intermediaries between the first two layers help to split design and management concerns, in particular, to balance customer satisfaction by services with efficiency of using platform resources. Each lower layer provides to a higher layer an operating environment, in which terms the higher level sees the lower layer and maps its objects onto the objects of the environment. The report outlines the basic high-level concepts, issues, and main problems, such virtual (core) services and virtual resources (servers), configuring of a virtual center inside a platform center or over several platform centers, deployment of services among servers of the virtual center, dynamic service monitoring and management.