An agent based architecture for VM software tracking in Cloud Federations

Cloud Computing is the reference model for IT specialists offering high quality services in a pay-per-use fashion. Architectures and protocols for Cloud Federations have been designed to meet emerging requirements of Cloud infrastructure. In such a context IT providers can mutually rent virtual resources and exchange metadata in order to get more opportunity. In this paper we define VST - Virtual machine Software Tracking - as the process of extracting detailed information about software running in virtual machines in a transparent manner. Coupling VST data with those of resource consumption can help IaaS providers to be more precise when assigning resources to VMs. Moreover, sharing VST information across the cloud federation can help IaaS providers to get decision about VM placement in time. For this aim we provide an agent based architecture for collecting and sharing VST data in a Cloud Federation, together with a skeleton implementation by which the architecture has been tested.