The management of clouds comprised of hundreds of hosts and virtual machines present challenging problems to administrators in ensuring that performance agreements are met and that resources are efficiently utilized. Automated approaches can help in managing such environments. Autonomic managers using policy-based management can provide a useful approach to such automation. We outline how collections of collaborating autonomic managers in cloud can be a step towards better management of clouds. We describe how a hierarchy of policy-based autonomic managers can collaborate using messages. The messages and when to communicate is inferred automatically from the policies given to the managers. We evaluate the approach via a prototype inspired by a cloud virtualized infrastructure and show how collaboration between managers in a hierarchy can improve the response time of a web server and avoid service level agreement violations. Results of three different scenarios shows the importance of collaboration between managers at different authority levels and how this collaboration can help to increase efficiency of current infrastructures.
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