Abstract: A method to perform server provisioning on a plurality of computer systems to generate a plurality of target virtual machines includes: obtaining configurations from a pool comprising at least one existing candidate virtual server or server image through a discovery process; performing a clustering analysis on the configurations to group the configurations into at least two groups; and for each group, selecting a configuration from among the configurations of the group as a candidate virtual machine image; determining a cost of actions required to be performed on the candidate virtual image to result in target virtual machines with a same configuration as the configurations of the group; and selecting the candidate virtual image with the lowest cost.

Abstract: A system and computer-implemented method for generating an optimized allocation of a plurality of tasks across a plurality of processors or slots for processing or execution in a distributed computing environment. In a cloud computing environment implementing a MapReduce framework, the system and computer-implemented method may be used to schedule map or reduce tasks to processors or slots on the network such that the tasks are matched to processors or slots in a data locality aware fashion wherein the suitability of node and the characteristics of the task are accounted for using a minimum cost flow function.