Agent-based monitoring of virtual machines

One of the main benefits of deploying system virtualization technology is the isolation provided by the virtualization platform. The virtualization layer encapsulates the guest system state in a way that renders it difficult to be aware of the internal states of the guests. This knowledge gap or lack of the higher knowledge, is known as Semantic Gap. In this paper, an agent-based monitoring system will be described as a new technique to at least partially bridge the Semantic Gap between the host machine and the virtual guests. The monitor controls a pool of scheduled backups of the running virtual machines.