A Framework for Effective Placement of Virtual Machine Replicas for Highly Available Performance-sensitive Cloud-based Applications

Abstract

Applications are increasingly being deployed in the Cloud due to benefits stemming from economy of scale, scalability, flexibility and utility-based pricing model. Although most cloud-based applications have hitherto been enterprisestyle, there is a new trend towards hosting performancesensitive applications in the cloud that demand both high availability and good response times. In the current stateof- the-art in cloud computing research, there does not exist solutions that provide both high availability and acceptable response times to these applications in a way that also optimizes resource consumption in data centers, which is a key consideration for cloud providers. This paper addresses this dual challenge by presenting a design of a fault-tolerant framework for virtualized data centers that makes two important contributions. First, it describes an architecture of a fault-tolerance framework that can be used to automatically deploy replicas of virtual machines in data centers in a way that optimizes resources while assures availability and responsiveness. Second, it describes a specific formulation of a replica deployment combinatorial optimization problem that can be plugged into our strategizable deployment framework.