Patent ID: 8799920

Claim:
A method for processing information related to management of a cluster-based pool of resources comprising one or more clusters wherein each cluster comprises one or more hosts executing one or more virtual machines (VMs), the method comprising: collecting workload attributes to determine a customer's Infrastructure Units required (IUreq), wherein the customer's IUreq is a quantity of universal Infrastructure Units (IUs) required by the customer wherein an IU is defined as a function of processing speed and virtual machine memory size; determining cluster and host attributes; based on cluster attributes, when more than one cluster is required to be allocated to a customer's Infrastructure Units required (IUreq): performing first processing including determining whether to allocate additional clusters to the customer or to add one or more hosts to one cluster, making it a stretched cluster, and allocating the stretched cluster to the customer; based on cluster attributes, when a single cluster is required to be allocated to the IUreq: performing second processing regarding determination that the IUreq must be allocated across multiple hosts, including allocating storage as a function of a maximum number of VMs per cluster and wherein the maximum number of VMs per cluster is determined to be sufficient to provide an acceptable outage and recovery time, the acceptable outage and recovery time calculated as a function of IUreq guaranteed to the customer divided by migration or high availability time per virtual machine; based on host attributes, when a single host is required to be allocated to the IUreq: performing third processing including allocating IUs as a function of a number of virtual machines per host; and determining, based on set criteria, a best fit number of virtual machines across the hosts for a customer's resource requirement; wherein the set criteria includes a quantity of the infrastructure units used by the customer and a quantity of virtual machines (VMs) allocated to the customer.