The oVirt project allows efficient management of virtualized datacenters. Deciding what machine should host a certain VM is one of the important functions of the management platform. Unfortunately it is also one of the complex ones, because there can be many rules governing the placement policy and there is a time limit in which a VM has to be started or migration initiated. Till now each VM was considered separately and that caused fragmentation of free resources.

We are about to present a new solution to this issue in this presentation. We have started a cooperation with the OptaPlanner team that develops an optimization engine based on probabilistic (soft computing) algorithms. This means that oVirt will feed situation updates to an optimization service and continuously receive improved solutions back. It will then use the precomputed results for rebalancing the clusters.