License cost aware VM placement in Openstack Strategy

Enterprise and corporate data centers nowadays comprise hybrid virtual environments for technical reasons and to avoid vendor lock-in. These hybrid environments are typically characterized as development/test, production and research environments, isolated with varying levels of security, service level agreements and business objectives. VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V have strongly cemented their place in production environments, capturing over 80% of the market share of virtual environments due to their stability, rich feature set and reliable support. However, on the flip side, IT departments of enterprises end up incurring high licensing costs of these proprietary virtual platforms. These costs vary for different platforms and even for specific combinations. One of the main challenges of IT departments is to optimize licensing costs in the data center. In this paper, we present a method to optimize the licensing costs as cost function by introducing the notion of cost-aware VM placement using OpenStack.