Resource Provisioning for Virtualized Server Applications

Data centre virtualization creates an agile environment for application deployment. Applications run within one or more virtual machines and are hosted on various servers throughout the data centre. One key mechanism provided by modern virtualization technologies is dynamic resource allocation. Using this technique virtual machines can be allocated resources as required and therefore, occupy only the necessary resources for their hosted application. In fact, two of the main challenges faced by contemporary data centres, server consolidation and power saving, can be tackled efficiently by capitalising on this mechanism.