VMware, Inc.
GENERATION, ACTUATION, AND ENFORCEMENT OF POLICIES FOR RESOURCES WITHIN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEM

Abstract:

The generation, actuation, and enforcement of policies within a distributed computing system is provided. The policies are employed to manage the resources of the system. The resources include virtualized resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) and virtual storage disks (VSDs). A policy includes a rule and scope. Enforcing a policy includes applying the rule to resources that are within the policy's scope. Policies are employed to constrain the leasing period and reclaim leased resources, as well constrain the access of certain users to specific operations on the leased resources. Policies may be created via a UI that automatically generates a policy encoding. The policy is registered and accessed via a policy store. When multiple policies target a common resource, merging strategies are applied to the multiple policies. The multiple policies are ranked, merged, filtered, and any remaining conflicts are resolved to generate an effective policy that is consistent with the multiple policies and is enforced on the common resource.