Dynamic management of applications with constraints in virtualized data centres

Managing single-VM applications in data centres is a well-studied problem, managing multi-VM applications is not. Multi-VM applications usually have, in addition to their basic resource requirements, a special set of requirements that the data centre provider has to satisfy as well. We refer to these requirements as placement constraints. We propose two management strategies designed to manage multi-VM applications with placement constraints in data centres. These management strategies aim to increase data centre's resource utilization (and thus reduce power consumption) while at the same time minimizing SLA violations. One of the management strategies enforces placement constraints at all times, while the other allows for a temporary violation of placement constraints. The two management strategies are evaluated through simulation in multiple scenarios. Results suggest that both strategies are able to achieve high levels of infrastructure utilization and SLA achievement, while satisfying applications' placement constraints, and that temporarily violating constraints does not provide any advantage and it does add cost.