Patent ID: 8732310

Claim:
A computer-implemented system for policy-driven capacity management in a resource provisioning environment, the system comprising: an admission controller for storing, in an operational database: one or more virtual resource sets (VRSs) and elasticity ranges for components to be deployed in the resource provisioning environment, and probabilistic guarantees on the elasticity ranges defined in a service manifest provided by a service subscriber; a monitor for collecting historical data about capacity usage in the resource provisioning environment and failure statistics from the operational database, in addition to prior service commitments due to previously contracted service level agreements (SLAs) stored in a SLA repository; an equivalent capacity calculator for calculating equivalent capacity for the resource provisioning environment based on a defined residual benefit goal, and other business goals instrumented by way of a policy engine, wherein equivalent capacity refers to minimum allocated capacity sufficient to guarantee QoS commitments subject to acceptable risk level of non-compliance due to congestion, such that equivalent capacity is as close to physical capacity as possible; and a placement controller for placing requested virtual resources on physical resources, in response to determining that sufficient physical capacity is available to host the calculated equivalent capacity, wherein an acceptable risk level (ARL) with respect to SLA non-compliance due to congestion for a service provider is defined by a policy engine such that if the available physical capacity is greater than the equivalent capacity and feasible placement of virtual resources belonging to the VRSs exists for an equivalent capacity for resource ranges defined for a usage windows, then availability SLAs of VRSs are protected at with probability=1−ARL, where ARL is the acceptable risk level probability.