Admission Control for Virtual Machine Cluster

A high-availability cluster of virtualization systems in which failover is supported at least in part by an admission control system that tracks, for each virtual machine, a set of resource requirements and admitting virtual machine computations to the cluster based on an admission control policy that, consonant with the resource requirements of virtual machines provisioned to any particular set of the virtualization systems, and that assures sufficient excess capacity on other virtualization systems of the cluster to support, in the event of failure of the particular set, the re-instantiation and resumption of all virtual machines operative thereon on the other virtualization systems of the cluster.

A computer program product encoded in one or more computer readable media, the product comprising:

• provisioning system code executable in association with respective virtualization systems of a cluster, the provisioning system code including an instruction sequence executable to track, for each virtual machine, a set of resource requirements and to admit virtual machine computations to the cluster based on an admission control policy that, consonant with the resource requirements of virtual machines provisioned to any particular set of virtualization systems, assures sufficient excess capacity on other virtualization systems of the cluster to support, in the event of interruption of the particular set, failover of all virtual machines operative thereon to the other virtualization systems of the cluster;
• and
• the provisioning system code further including interface code executable to propagate failover target information for admitted virtual machine computations to respective failover agents executing in conjunction with respective virtualization systems of the cluster.