Scheduling-Capable Autonomic Manager for Policy Based IT Change Management System

Abstract

Managing large IT environments consisting of thousands of computers, routers, switches, and printers from different vendors is expensive and labor intensive. A typical piece of equipment goes through several planned and unplanned software and hardware upgrades. Maintaining and upgrading with minimal disruption and administrative support is a challenging task. One problem faced by IT administrators, in this change management process, is to arrive at a schedule for applying one or more change requests to the IT infrastructure. In this paper, the focus is on the problem of scheduling the change requests in the presence of organizational policies governing the use, access and availability of the IT infrastructure, we provide two approaches to scheduling and describe an implementation of a scheduler which shows the feasibility of our approach. The implementation is integrated with an autonomic manager described in earlier papers [1].