Deva: Distributed Ensembles Of Virtual Appliances In The Cloud

Low upfront costs, rapid deployment of infrastructure and flexible management of resources has resulted in the quick adoption of cloud computing. Nowadays, different types of applications in areas such as enterprise web, virtual labs and high-performance computing are already being deployed in private and public clouds. However, one of the remaining challenges is how to allow users to specify Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for composite groups of virtual machines and enforce them effectively across the deployed resources. In this paper, we propose an Infrastructure as a Service resource manager capable of allocating Distributed Ensembles of Virtual Appliances (DEVAs) in the Cloud. DEVAs are groups of virtual machines and their network connectivities instantiated on heterogeneous shared resources with QoS specifications for individual entities as well as their connections. We discuss the different stages in their lifecycle: declaration, scheduling, provisioning and dynamic management, and show how this approach can be used to maintain QoS for complex deployments of virtual resources.