Efficient resource virtualization and sharing strategies for heterogeneous grid environments

Resource virtualization has emerged as a powerful technique for customized resource provisioning in grid and data center environments. In this paper, we describe efficient strategies for policy-based controlling of virtualization of the physical resources. With these strategies, virtualization is controlled taking into account workload requirements, available capacities of physical resources, and the governing policies. Realizing this control requires simultaneous handling of three problems: (i) determining the virtual resource configurations, (ii) the mapping of resulting virtual resources to physical resources, and (iii) the mapping of workloads to the virtual resources. We pose this as an optimization problem and solve this problem using a linear programming (LP) based approach. We evaluate this approach by implementing it in the Harmony grid environment consisting of heterogeneous resources and heterogeneous workload. Experimental results indicate that our approach is efficient and effective. We extend this approach further by using a two-phase heuristic that allows the decision making component to scale up to handle large scale grid systems.