Patent ID: 6990666

Claim:
A virtualized logical server cloud comprising: physical resources comprising a plurality of networked physical servers executing virtualization software that virtualizes a portion of the physical resources to implement logical resources which includes at least one logical server; each logical server having a plurality of different activation states including an active state, a suspended state, an off state and at least one storage state, wherein each of the plurality of activation states consumes a successively reduced amount of the physical resources from the active state to the at least one storage state; and a server cloud manager (SCM) interfaced to the physical resources for managing operation and activation state of each logical server, the SCM including a dynamic state manager (DSM) comprising: a resource definition that incorporates information of the physical and logical resources of the virtualized logical server cloud, including cost, priority, usage and demand information of the physical and logical resources and that incorporates dependencies and relationships between the physical and logical resources; a rules module that comprises predetermined behavioral rules based on demand, usage, priority and cost information, wherein the behavioral rules define optimized utilization of the physical and logical resources of the virtualized logical server cloud; and a state manager engine, linked to the resource definition and the rules module, that cooperates with the SCM to apply the behavioral rules to control the activation state of each logical server of the virtualized logical server cloud between the active, suspended, off and storage states to achieve optimized utilization of the physical and logical resources.