A Classification of Middleware to Support Virtual Machines Adaptability in IaaS

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model makes exten-sive use of virtualization to achieve workload isolation and efficient resource management. In general, the underlying supporting technologies are virtual machines monitors (e.g. hypervisors). Isolation is a static mechanism, relying on hardware or operating system support to be enforced. On the other hand, resource management is dynamic and mid-dleware must be employed to adapt VMs in order to fit their guest’s needs. Although the services offered by virtual machines are used or extended in several works in the literature, the community lacks an organized and integrated perspective of the mech-anisms and strategies regarding resource management and focusing on adaptation, which would allow for an effective comparison on the quality of the adaptation process. In this work we review the main approaches for adapta-tion and monitoring in virtual machines deployments, their tradeoff, and their main mechanisms for resource manage-ment. We frame them into the control loop (monitoring, decision and actuation). Furthermore, we propose a classifi-cation framework that, when applied to a group of systems, can help visually in determining their similarities and differ-ences