US Patent 9697028 Directed placement for request instances

Techniques for placing guest virtual machines on a distributed and/or virtualized computer system while obeying communications latency constraints are described herein. A placement map is created with regions based on available capacity measurements of one or more host machines in a virtualized computer system. Requests to place one or more guest virtual machines on the host machines are retrieved and the placements are optimized by iteratively assigning the requests to the regions in the map such that constraints are satisfied but capacity may be exceeded and then reassigning those requests that violate available capacity. The iterative process completes when a valid placement map is produced.