Quality of service resource management

Today's computing environments are growing both in size and complexity at an astounding rate. At the same time, the applications used in these environments are becoming more numerous and more complicated and are being used in more mission critical roles in the enterprise. Consequently, users' demands for performance, reliability, and availability are increasing rapidly. To meet these needs and satisfy user requirements, a high level of quality of service must be delivered to the user. Since neither applications nor the computing environments they are deployed in are designed to do so naturally, quality of service must be managed.; At the heart of quality of service management lies resource management. If we had an infinite supply of all computing resources, we could satisfy all user requirements simultaneously; unfortunately, this is not the world we live in. Given the limited and often scarce supply of computing resources, effective resource management is therefore necessary to provide quality of service to the user. While this has been widely recognized, and work has been done to address this problem, there are many issues and problems that remain unresolved.; In this work, we present a quality of service resource management solution that overcomes the obstacles imposed by the problem. In doing so, we make several key contributions to this area of research. The approach to quality of service management taken is new and innovative; one that is dynamic, end-to-end, application-level, adjusts the computing environment to fit application needs, and is application, environment, and resource independent. A theoretical examination of the quality of service resource management problem found that most realistic resource management scenarios are NP-complete problems. With this finding in mind, several resource management algorithms were developed to improve quality of service delivery. These algorithms were integrated into a general quality of service management architecture, which was in turn developed into a working prototype management system. With this prototype system, extensive quality of service management experiments were conducted and new light was shed upon the issues surrounding quality of service resource management.