Virtual Infrastructure Managers Used in Production
Flavien Quesnel · 2014
This chapter describes the main virtual infrastructure managers (VIMs) that are deployed in production namely Eucalyptus, Nimbus, OpenNebula, Microsoft system center virtual machine manager (SCVMM), vCloud, vSphere, XenServer, CloudStack and OpenStack. It concentrates on how the VIMs organized distributed infrastructure resources. VIMs are able to manage infrastructures ranging from a cluster to a data center or even a federation of data centers. This organization enabled infrastructure owners and users to benefit from increased flexibility. The chapter focuses on virtual machine scheduling, and demonstrates that most of the schedulers are centralized, virtual machines are often scheduled in a static way, and the most common scheduling policies are load balancing and consolidation. It highlights the advantages of using virtualization, for infrastructure owners and users. The chapter points out that the VIMs have drawbacks, especially regarding interfaces and scheduling.