ACRA: a unified admission control and resource allocation framework for virtualized environments

Exploiting the benefits of virtualization, web services are consolidated in large data centers. Managing the performance of such complex systems is a critical problem. Providers must offer applications with high quality of service (QoS) and performance and simultaneously achieve optimal utilization of their infrastructure. Meeting their Service Level Objectives (SLOs), such as response time in a dynamic environment (dense load, variable capacity), while minimizing the energy consumption of the data center is an open research problem. Most of the proposed approaches use either admission control or resource allocation techniques to solve it. We present a unified framework, which models the system's dynamic behavior with a group of state-space models, scales between different desired operation points and uses a set-theoretic control technique to solve admission control and resource allocation problems as a common decision problem with stability and robustness guarantees for the system under study.