that have been provisioned and are currently associated with an executing application or a persistently allocated application i e one that is not provisioned repeatedly when needed reserve pool 130 represents u201c raw u201d resources that have not yet been configured when u201c raw u201d resources are configured they may be added to either the available pool 140 or if necessary immediately used to satisfy an allocation request and thus be added to the allocated pool 120 available pool 140 represents compute network and storage etc resources in available pool 140 can be resources that have been pre configured in anticipation of some expected future or to satisfy an immediate need as illustrated in block diagram 100 there are three pools however any number of pools may be defined for example available pool 140 could be divided into several pools based on the specificity to which resources in the pools have been pre configured some resources may have been pre configured with only an operating system and a default level of compute capacity other resources may have been configured with an operating system os os patches and an application or set of applications installed those of ordinary skill in the art given the benefit of this disclosure will recognize that optimizing the granularity of pools and specificity of pre configuration of resources in pools may vary from one enterprise environment to the next based on particulars of each enterprise environment in accordance with this disclosure at least some embodiments are implemented in hardware software or a combination of hardware and software by one or more computer systems communicatively coupled to each other across a network or bus at least one.