Locating Virtual Infrastructures: Users and InP perspectives

The Cloud Computing wave consolidates the on-demand provisioning of configurable virtual machines. Recent projects have proposed the extension of the original IaaS paradigm to provide dynamic virtual networks to interconnect virtual IT resources, composing Virtual Infrastructures (VIs). In this new scenario, users with different objectives and expectations can rent dynamically provisioned virtual infrastructures to execute their applications during a given time slot. VIs can be allocated anywhere on top of a distributed and virtualized substrate. This decoupling from the geographical location introduces concerns such as a latency increase in network communications (user's perspective), and the fragmentation of physical resources (Infrastructure Provider's - InP - perspective). This context motivates efforts to investigate and deploy new models and tools which consider the geographical location of virtual infrastructures. Our work concentrates on the allocation of VIs guided by both the user's and the InP's constraints. We propose a formulation of the allocation problem considering the user's expectations as well as the physical-substrate provider's goals. Our initial experiments demonstrate that it is possible to improve the quality of the virtual-infrastructure allocation (user perspective) while simultaneously decreasing the physical substrate's fragmentation and the substrate's cost.