A Reinforcement Learning Model for Virtual Machines Consolidation in Cloud Data Center

Improving the energy efficiency while guaranteeing quality of services (QoS) is one of the main challenges of efficient resource management of large-scale data centers. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation is a promising approach that aims to reduce the energy consumption by reallocating VMs to hosts dynamically. Previous works mostly have considered only the current utilization of resources in the dynamic VM consolidation procedure, which imposes unnecessary migrations and host power mode transitions. Moreover, they select the destinations of VM migrations with conservative approaches to keep the service-level agreements , which is not in line with packing VMs on fewer physical hosts. In this paper, we propose a regression-based approach that predicts the resource utilization of the VMs and hosts based on their historical data and uses the predictions in different problems of the whole process. Predicting future utilization provides the opportunity of selecting the host with higher utilization for the destination of a VM migration, which leads to a better VMs placement from the viewpoint of VM consolidation. Results show that our proposed approach reduces the energy consumption of the modeled data center by up to 38% compared to other works in the area, guaranteeing the same QoS. Moreover, the results show a better scalability than all other approaches. Our proposed approach improves the energy efficiency even for the largest simulated benchmarks and takes less than 5% time overhead to execute for a data center with 7600 physical hosts.

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an effective way to improve resource utilization and reduce energy consumption in cloud data centers. Most existing studies have considered VM consolidation as a bin-packing problem, but the current schemes commonly ignore the long-term relationship between VMs and hosts. In addition, there is a lack of long-term consideration for resource optimization in the VM consolidation, which results in unnecessary VM migration and increased energy consumption. To address these limitations, a VM consolidation method based on multi-step prediction and affinity-aware technique for energy-efficient cloud data centers (MPaAFVMC) is proposed. The proposed method uses an improved linear regression prediction algorithm to predict the next-moment resource utilization of hosts and VMs, and obtains the stage demand of resources in the future period through multi-step prediction, which is realized by iterative prediction. Then, based on the multi-step prediction, an affinity model between the VM and host is designed using the first-order correlation coefficient and Euclidean distance. During the VM consolidation, the affinity value is used to select the migration VM and placement host. The proposed method is compared with the existing consolidation algorithms on the PlanetLab and Google cluster real workload data using the CloudSim simulation platform. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve significant improvement in reducing energy consumption, VM migration costs, and service level agreement (SLA) violations.

Cloud computing is currently playing an essential role in supporting emerging sectors such as smart energy, intelligent transportation, and large-scale distributed systems. The scalability and adaptability features of cloud computing are efficiently enable resource utilization and continuous data exchange in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. However, the increasing demand for cloud services has raised the energy consumption of cloud data centers, which has a critical environmental impact. Therefore, sustainable resource management tactics have become crucial in today's world. Dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation is one of the major tactics for sustainable resource management in the green cloud computing environment. Herein, a novel dynamic Energy-Aware Cosine Similarity Learning Network (ECSLN) is proposed to predict the overutilized host. Further, an Impact Factor-Based VM Selection (IFBVMS) method is proposed to select VMs for migration, and an ECSLN-Packed Placement method for VM placement into hosts. The main aim of the proposed VM consolidation is to maximize energy efficiency while preserving compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for sustainable environments. The experimental evaluation using real-world traces like PlanetLab, Bitbrains, and Alibaba Cluster 2020 workload validates that the proposed VM consolidation methods significantly reduce energy consumption and SLA violation compared to the existing methods for sustainable environments. The evaluation shows that the proposed ECSLN-based consolidation framework enables green cloud infrastructure by intelligently balancing energy consumption, SLA violation, and performance of cloud data centers.

Server consolidation technique plays an important role in energy management and load-balancing of cloud computing systems. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation is a promising consolidation approach in this direction, which aims at using least active physical machines (PMs) through appropriately migrating VMs to reduce resource consumption. The resulting optimization problem is well-acknowledged to be NP-hard optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a novel merge-and-split-based coalitional game-theoretic approach for VM consolidation in heterogeneous clouds. The proposed approach first partitions PMs into different groups based on their load levels, then employs a coalitional-game-based VM consolidation algorithm (CGMS) in choosing members from such groups to form effective coalitions, performs VM migrations among the coalition members to maximize the payoff of every coalition, and close PMs with low energy-efficiency. Experimental results based on multiple cases clearly demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms traditional ones in terms of energy-saving and level of load fairness.

Cloud computing providers have to deal with the energy-performance trade-off: minimizing energy consumption, while meeting service level agreement (SLA) requirements. This paper proposes a new heuristic approach for the dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud data centers. The fast best-fit decreasing (FBFD) algorithm for intelligent VMs allocating into hosts and dynamic utilization rate (DUR) algorithm for utilization space and VM migration are successfully proposed. We performed simulations using PlanetLab and GWDG data center workloads to compare our approach against the existing models. It has been observed that the FBFD heuristic algorithm produces better results compared to modified BFD algorithm in terms of energy consumption and SLA violation. Additionally, the time complexity of FBFD algorithm is significantly improved from the order of O(\(m\,*\,n\)) to O(\(m\,*\,\log _2{n}\)). Furthermore, leaving some rates of capacity in the physical machines by the proposed DUR algorithm for VMs to be extended reduces the number of migrations which in turn improves the energy consumption and SLA violation. Our heuristic approach is evaluated using CloudSim and the results show that it performs better than the current state-of-the-art approaches.

DataABC: A fast ABC based energy-efficient live VM consolidation policy with data-intensive energy evaluation model

A multi-objective approach for energy-efficient and reliable dynamic VM consolidation in cloud data centers

SummaryEfficient energy and temperature management techniques are essential elements for operators of cloud data centers. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation using live migration techniques presents a great opportunity for cloud service providers to adaptively reduce energy consumption and optimize their resource utilization. In recent studies, power consumption readings of individual physical hosts were chosen as the main monitoring parameters in their allocation policies, whereas very few have considered host temperature, which has shown to have a negative impact on server reliability, as a migration criterion. In this work, a thermal‐aware VM consolidation mechanism is proposed for resource allocation optimization and server reliability assurance. We consider the variability in host temperature as a migration criterion to avoid outage incidents via having better VM consolidations. Extensive simulation results obtained from CloudSim show the promising performance of the proposed mechanism in energy saving while reducing the number of server outage incidents due to fluctuations in host temperature.

Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation provides a promising approach to save energy and improve resource utilization in cloud data centers. However, aggressive consolidation of VMs may lead to performance degradation of data centers and even Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation. Therefore, it is very important to solve the tradeoff between reduction of SLA violation level and energy costs. In this paper, we propose a Host State 3-order Markov Chain prediction model for SLA-aware and energy efficient consolidation of VMs in cloud data centers. We propose two adaptive utilization thresholds based on a robust statistical method for host state estimate, and our model uses them to build a 3-order Markov Chain Transition Matrix manually for host state detection. We implement our algorithms on Cloudsim simulator for comparative study. The experimental results show that our model can significantly reduce SLA violation rates while keeping energy cost efficient, it can reduce the metric of SLA Violation by at most 98.69% and the metric of Energy by at most 21.88% for real world workload.

Cloud Computing has emerged as a computing paradigm where services are provided through the internet in recent years. Offering on-demand services has transformed the IT companies' working environment, leading to a linearly increasing trend of its usage. The provisioning of the Computing infrastructure is achieved with the help of virtual machines. A great figure of physical devices is required to satisfy the users' resource requirements. To meet the requirements of the submitted workloads that are usually dynamic, the cloud data centers cause the over-provisioning of cloud resources. The result of this over-provisioning is the resource wastage with an increase in the levels of energy consumption, causing a raised operational cost. High CO2 emissions result from this huge energy consumption by data centers, posing a threat to environmental stability. The environmental concern demands for the controlled energy consumption, which can be attained by optimal usage of resources to achieve in the server load, by minimizing the number of active nodes, and by minimizing the frequency of switching between active and de-active server mode in the data center. Motivated by these actualities, we discuss numerous statistical, deterministic, probabilistic, machine learning and optimization based computational solutions for the cloud computing environment. A comparative analysis of the computational methods, on the basis of architecture, consolidation step involved, objectives achieved, simulators involved and resources utilized, has also been presented. A taxonomy for virtual machine (VM) consolidation has also been derived in this research article followed by emerging challenges and research gaps in the field of VM consolidation in cloud computing environment.

Cloud data centers present a challenge to environmental sustainability because of their significant energy consumption. Additionally, performance degradation resulting from energy management solutions, such as virtual machine (VM) consolidation, impacts service level agreements (SLAs) between cloud service providers and users. Thus, to achieve a balance between efficient energy consumption and avoiding SLA violations, we propose a novel VM consolidation algorithm. Conventional algorithms result in unnecessary migrations when improperly selecting VMs. Therefore, our proposed E2SVM algorithm addresses this issue by selecting VMs with high load fluctuations and minimal resource usage from overloaded servers. These selected VMs are then placed on normally loaded servers, considering their stability index. Moreover, our approach prevents server underutilization by either applying all or no VM migrations. Simulation results demonstrate a 12.9% decrease in maximum energy consumption compared with the minimum migration time VM selection policy. In addition, a 47% reduction in SLA violations was observed when using the medium absolute deviation as the overload detection policy. Therefore, this approach holds promise for real-world data centers because it minimizes energy waste and maintains low SLA violations.

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an emerging solution for energy saving in cloud data centers. An appropriate VM consolidation policy must change accordingly, depending on the situation. To easily deploy a VM consolidation solution, this paper proposes a VM consolidation framework for Apache CloudStack, which is a popular open source cloud platform software suite. We separate the VM consolidation mechanism from the policy used to decide which VMs should be moved to somewhere more appropriate to run. This framework is a modular architecture that combines various resource monitoring systems, power control mechanisms, and VM packing algorithms. Using the proposed framework, we have demonstrated that a Web application can consolidate and deconsolidate VMs so as to balance the load of CPU utilization among physical machines in response to the number of physical machines in operation. Experimental results reveal the proposed framework is preliminary, but provides the required functionality.

Management of cloud resources and social change in a multi-tier environment: A novel finite automata using ant colony optimization with spanning tree

An intelligent ensemble learning approach for energy efficient and interference aware dynamic virtual machine consolidation

Security-aware dynamic VM consolidation