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Cloud computing promises to provide on-demand computing, storage, and networking resources. However, most cloud providers simply offer virtual machines (VMs) without bandwidth and delay guarantees, which may hurt the performance of the deployed services. Recently, some proposals suggested remediating such limitation by offering virtual data centers (VDCs) instead of VMs only. However, they have only considered the case where VDCs are embedded within a single data center. In practice, infrastructure providers should have the ability to provision requested VDCs across their distributed infrastructure to achieve multiple goals including revenue maximization, operational costs reduction, energy efficiency, and green IT, or to simply satisfy geographic location constraints of the VDCs. In this paper, we propose Greenhead, a holistic resource management framework for embedding VDCs across …