GIT-CERCS-07-20
Sanjay Kumar, Vanish Talwar, Ripal Nathuji, Partha Ranganathan, Karsten Schwan,
VMedia: Enhanced Multimedia Services in Virtualized Systems
Management and automation are important issues in enterprise
environments, often consuming the largest fraction of the overall IT
budget. A key challenge here is co-ordination across multiple
management solutions deployed in different management domains,
including across hardware and software, across different levels of
abstraction, and across different hosts. This paper makes three
contributions to addressing this problem. First, we propose a novel
management co-ordination architecture for virtualized
environments. Our architecture includes two powerful abstractions --
m-channels, which provide mechanisms for communication between
the hardware, virtual machines, and applications and m-brokers,
which allow high-level policy co-ordination across different
management agents. Second, we discuss Dom-M, an instantiation of
our architecture in the context of the Xen hypervisor, and identify
tradeoffs between different implementations of such management
domains. Finally, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we
implement and evaluate different cross-level solutions for power
management using our abstractions, and also discuss qualitatively
other applications including storage backup, inventory management, and
trust management.