Allocation Problems in LargeScale Server Consolidation

Overview

Today's data centers offer many different IT services mostly hosted on dedicated physical servers. Virtualization provides a new technical means for server consolidation allowing for higher utilization of server capacities. The term refers to the abstraction of computing resources across many aspects of computing and has been used to describe different techniques. Virtualization engines provide a comfortable way of hosting multiple virtual servers (including operating system plus applications) on a single physical server, and sometimes to migrate and dynamically allocate these virtual servers to other physical servers on demand. This allows for much flexibility in capacity management. Server consolidation describes the process of combining the workloads of several different servers on a set of target servers.