Patent ID: 8381222

Claim:
A method, with an information processing system, for specifying equivalent resources in a policy driven automatic computing system, the method comprising: identifying a set of resource equivalencies indicating a set of logically equivalent resources to achieve a desired end state of an autonomic computing system, wherein the desired end state indicates an operational state associated with one or more autonomic computing system elements to be achieved by the autonomic computing system by utilizing one or more resources associated with the set of resource equivalencies, wherein identifying the set of resource equivalencies comprises: harvesting implicit relationships among at least the set of logically equivalent resources via self-discovery, wherein the set of implicit relationships at least indicate one or more of a set of resource dependencies for at least one resource in the set of resources, and wherein self-discovery includes automatically discovering the set of implicit relationships without the user explicitly specifying the implicit relationships; discovering at least one additional resource based on the harvesting that is logically equivalent to at least one resource in the set of logically equivalent resources; adding the at least one additional resource to at least one resource equivalency in the set of resource equivalencies; storing the set of resource equivalencies including the at least one additional resource in memory; selecting at least one resource equivalency from the set of resource equivalencies; selecting at least one resource from the selected resource equivalency; and using, with the autonomic computing system, the selected at least one resource as required by the autonomic computing system to perform at least one service to achieve the desired end state.