Use Cases of Virtualization in the Management of Distributed and Parallel Systems

Efficiently sharing resources between multiple applications that run on the same distributed infrastructure is challenging. These applications have different and possible time varying requirements and in the same time, users demand different quality of service guarantees. However, current resource management systems still make it difficult to specify and meet these requirements. Recently, virtualization technologies have been seen as a useful tool for managing distributed infrastructures. This lead us to survey the use cases of virtualization in distributed computing. We start from giving an overview of virtualization techniques together with what advantages and concerns may come from their use. Then we introduce the issues that may come from managing distributed virtualized infrastructure and we present a taxonomy of representative works that used virtualization as a tool for resource management. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of the advancements done in resource management with the use of virtualization