Résumé : Datacenters provide an economical and practical solution for hosting large scale n-tier Web applications. When scalability and high availability are required, each tier can be implemented as multiple replicas, which can absorb extra load and avoid a single point of failure. Realizing these benefits in practice, however, requires that replicas be assigned to datacenter nodes according to certain placement constraints. To provide the required quality of service to all of the hosted applications, the datacenter must consider of all of their specific constraints. When the constraints are not satisfied, the datacenter must quickly adjust the mappings of applications to nodes, taking all of the applications' constraints into account. This paper presents Plasma, an approach for hosting highly available Web applications, based on dynamic consolidation of virtual machines and placement constraint descriptions. The placement constraint descriptions allow the data- center administrator to describe the datacenter infrastructure and each appli- cation administrator to describe his requirements on the VM placement. Based on the descriptions, Plasma continuously optimizes the placement of the VMs in order to provide the required quality of service. Experiments on simulated configurations show that the Plasma reconfiguration algorithm is able to man- age a datacenter with up to 2000 nodes running 4000 VMs with 800 placement constraints. Real experiments on a small cluster of 8 working nodes running 3 instances of the RUBiS benchmarks with a total of 21 VMs show that con- tinuous consolidation is able to reach 85% of the load of a 21 working nodes cluster.