Towards an agent-based symbiotic architecture for autonomic management of virtualized data centers

Abstract

The increasing scale and complexity of virtualized data centers pose significant challenges to system management software stacks, which still rely on special-purpose controllers to optimize the operation of cloud infrastructures. Autonomic computing allows complex systems to assume much of their own management, achieving self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-protection without external intervention. This paper proposes an agent-based architecture for autonomic cloud management, where resources and virtual machines are associated with worker agents that monitor changes in their local environments, interact with each other, make their own decisions, and take adaptive actions supervised by a network of management processes. To fulfill global objectives, the management processes conduct whatif simulations and update the worker agents' local rules when necessary. Such a guided decentralized decision making method can mitigate the pressure on the system management stack, improve the effectiveness of resource management, and accelerate the response to failures and attacks.

Symbiotic simulation for the operational management of inpatient beds: model development and validation using Δ-method

“…[32]) and Data Centre operations (e.g. [33,34]). A small number of applications of symbiotic simulation also exist in the context of health care, and it is clearly an area with scope for further research, development and application.…”

Symbiotic Simulation System: Hybrid Systems Model Meets Big Data Analytics

“…Sunderrajan et al 2014;Rhodes-Leader et al 2018) and data center operations (e.g. Liu et al 2012;Abar et al 2016). Recently, Tan et al (2013) applied symbiotic simulation to support operational management decisions in an emergency department.…”

Automated Dynamic Resource Provisioning and Monitoring in Virtualized Large-Scale Datacenter

“…In symbiotic simulation paradigm, the simulation model benefits from the continuous supply of the latest data and the automatic validation of its simulation outputs, whereas the physical system benefits from the improved performance obtained from the analysis of simulation experiments. In this context, the proposals [7], [8] have inspired us the most and closely related to our research direction. More specifically, what we are trying to bring about is the advanced practical manifestation of the very basic idea envisioned in [7] by Qi Liu et al Primarily in this work, the authors put forward a multi-agent based symbiotic scheme for autonomic cloud management purposes.…”

“…In this context, the proposals [7], [8] have inspired us the most and closely related to our research direction. More specifically, what we are trying to bring about is the advanced practical manifestation of the very basic idea envisioned in [7] by Qi Liu et al Primarily in this work, the authors put forward a multi-agent based symbiotic scheme for autonomic cloud management purposes. The system architecture consists of a low-level execution (physical) layer and a high-level management (simulation) layer sharing together the same virtual infrastructure.…”