Increasing needs in computing power are satisfied nowadays by federating more and more computers (or nodes) to build distributed infrastructures. Historically, these infrastructures have been managed by means of user-space frameworks or distributed operating systems. Over the past few years, a new kind of software manager has appeared, managers that rely on system virtualization. System virtualization allows the software to be disassociated from the underlying node by encapsulating it in a virtual machine.
The contribution of this book lies precisely in this area of research; more specifically, the author proposes DVMS (Distributed Virtual Machine Scheduler), a more decentralized application to dynamically schedule virtual machines hosted on a distributed infrastructure. These virtual machines are created, deployed on nodes and managed during their entire lifecycle by virtual infrastructure managers (VIMs). Ways to improve the scalability of VIMs are proposed, one of which consists of decentralizing the processing of several management tasks.