Emerging trends toward cloud computing and virtualization have been opening new avenues to meet enormous demands of space, resource utilization, and energy efficiency in modern data centers. By being allowed to host many multi-tier applications in consolidated environments, cloud infrastructure providers enable resources to be shared among these applications at a very fine granularity. Meanwhile, resource virtualization has recently gained considerable attention in the design of computer systems and become a key ingredient for cloud computing. It provides significant improvement of aggregated power efficiency and high resource utilization by enabling resource consolidation. It also allows infrastructure providers to manage their resources in an agile way under highly dynamic conditions. However, these trends also raise significant challenges to researchers and practitioners to successfully achieve agile resource management in consolidated environments. First, they must deal with very different responsiveness of different applications, while handling dynamic changes in resource demands as applications' workloads change over time. Second, when provisioning resources, they must consider management costs such as power consumption and adaptation overheads (i.e., overheads incurred by dynamically reconfiguring resources). Dynamic provisioning of virtual resources entails the inherent performance-power tradeoff. Moreover, indiscriminate adaptations can result in significant overheads on power consumption and end-to-end performance. Hence, to achieve agile resource management, it is important to thoroughly investigate various performance characteristics of deployed applications, precisely integrate costs caused by adaptations, and then balance benefits and costs. Fundamentally, the research question is how to dynamically provision available resources for all deployed applications to maximize overall utility under time-varying workloads, while considering such management costs. Given the scope of the problem space, this dissertation aims to develop an optimization system that not only meets performance requirements of deployed applications, but also addresses tradeoffs between performance, power consumption, and adaptation overheads. To this end, this dissertation makes two distinct contributions. First, I show that adaptations applied to cloud infrastructures can cause significant overheads on not only end-to-end response time, but also server power consumption. Moreover, I show that such costs can vary in intensity and time scale against workload, adaptation types, and performance characteristics of hosted applications. Second, I address multi-dimensional optimization between server power consumption, performance benefit, and transient costs incurred by various adaptations. Additionally, I incorporate the overhead of the optimization procedure itself into the problem formulation. Typically, system optimization approaches entail intensive computations and potentially have a long delay to deal with a huge search space in cloud computing infrastructures. Therefore, this type of cost cannot be ignored when adaptation plans are designed. In this multi-dimensional optimization work, scalable optimization algorithm and hierarchical adaptation architecture are developed to handle many applications, hosting servers, and various adaptations to support various time-scale adaptation decisions.