Patent ID: 8291424

Claim:
A method of provisioning resources from a plurality of pools of resources in an on-demand computing system, the method comprising: obtaining a request for a resource; establishing a plurality of categories associated with properties of the resources; obtaining values for the plurality of categories for at least a portion of the resource categories; weighting the values to provide priority scores for the at least a portion of the resource categories, the weighting for each one of the at least a portion of the resources based at least in part on a combination of first weights provided by an owner of a one of the plurality of pools associated the one of the at least a portion of the resource categories and second weights provided at least one entity other than the owner; determining a resource to be provisioned from the at least a portion of the resource categories based at least in part on the priority scores; and if the priority scores for more than one of the at least a portion of the resource categories are the same, eliminating, prior to the determining, at least one of the plurality of pools of resource categories based at least in part on a criteria specified in the request that is different from the plurality of categories associated with the properties of the resources.