M-Channels and M-Brokers: Coordinated Management in Virtualized Systems

Management and automation are important issues in enterprise en- vironments especially in virtualized enterprises, often consuming the largest fraction of the overall IT budget. A key challenge here is coordination across multiple management solutions deployed at different system layers, including across hardware and software, across different levels of abstraction, and across different hosts. This paper proposes novel abstractions that provide a uniform ba- sis for management across different system levels and domains: (1) M-channels constitute the base mechanisms for communication between management embedded in hardware, in virtual machines, and in applications, and (2) M-brokers enable policy coordination across different management layers and solutions. The value of the approach is demonstrated with an implementation of coordi- nated power management policies that operate across the hardware- software boundary, for multiple virtual machines, and across dif- ferent physical platforms. Coordination is shown useful for meet- ing application-level SLAs and/or to enforce power caps, with or without assistance from guest virtual machines. Further demonstra- tions of utility involve other management tasks, including storage backup, inventory, and trust management. Experimental evalua- tions of M-brokers and M-channels use the Xen hypervisor and are attained on server-class AMD platforms.