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

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.

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.

Energy consumption in data center is currently the main focus of many large-scale enterprises and cloud service providers. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation technologies are widely used to improve resource utilization of data centers and reduce energy. They try to identify the poorly utilized physical hosts and make the most of the resources. Then idle hosts can be switched to sleep or active mode, meanwhile considering the real-time fluctuation of service workload. In this paper, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Virtual Machine Consolidation (RL-VMC) framework with an application to the cloud data center operation. The RL-VMC method uses an agent corresponding to a VM planner to interact with the environment, which encapsulates the data center running state, and learns the optimal policy to determine the migration mapping from VMs to physical hosts. Specifically, we adopt the on-policy method State-Action-Reward-State-Action (SARSA) in RL-VMC, which learns from experience to get the optimal VMs migration strategy and manage the host power mode as well. Additionally, we use the PBRS technology to speed up the convergence of the RL-VMC. Experimental results show that the RL-VMC method can adapt to the dynamic workload maintaining an improved balance between energy consumption and Service Level Agreements (SLA).

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.

By employing the virtual machines (VMs) consolidation technique at a virtualized data center, optimal mapping of VMs to physical machines (PMs) can be performed. The type of optimization approach and the policy of detecting the appropriate time to implement the consolidation process are influential in the performance of the consolidation technique. In a majority of researches, the consolidation approach merely focuses on the management of underloaded or overloaded PMs, while a number of VMs could also be in an underload or overload state. Managing an abnormal state of VM results in the postponement of PM getting into an abnormal state as well and affects the implementation time of the consolidation process. For the aim of optimal VM consolidation in this research, a self-adaptive architecture is presented to detect and manage underloaded and overloaded VMs /PMs in reaction to workload changes in the data center. The goal of consolidation process is employing the minimum number of active VMs and PMs, while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS). Assessment criteria of QoS are two parameters including average number of requests in the PM buffer and average waiting time in the VM. To evaluate these two parameters, a probabilistic model of the data center is proposed by applying the queuing theory. The assessment results of the probabilistic model form a basis for decision-making in the modules of the proposed architecture. Numerical results obtained from the assessment of the probabilistic model via discrete-event simulator under various parameter settings confirm the efficiency of the proposed architecture in achieving the aims of the consolidation process.

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.

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.

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

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 computing is a new computation technology that provides services to consumers and businesses. The main idea of Cloud computing is to present software and hardware services through the Internet to the users and organizations at all levels. In Cloud computing, the users pay for the services, which means a usage-based payment system is used in this technology. Using virtualization technology in computation resources enables the appropriate utilization of resources in cloud computing. One of the most significant challenging issues in virtualization technology is the placement of optimal virtual machines on physical machines in cloud data centers. The placement of virtual machines comprises a process wherein virtual machines are mapped onto physical machines in cloud data centers. Optimal deployment leads to the reduction in power consumption, optimal use of resources, traffic reduction in data centers, costs reduction, and efficiency enhancement of the data center in the cloud. The present article proposed a new approach using a combination of the Sine–Cosine Algorithm and Salp Swarm Algorithm as discrete multi-objective and chaotic functions for optimal virtual machine placement. The first goal of the proposed algorithm was to reduce the power consumption in cloud data centers by condensing the number of active physical machines. The second goal was to reduce the waste of resources and manage it by optimally virtual machine placement on physical machines in cloud data centers. The third objective was to minimize and reduce Service Level Agreement among the active physical machines in cloud data centers. The proposed method prevent the increase in the migration of virtual machines onto physical machines. Ultimately, the results obtained from the proposed algorithm were compared with those of previous akin algorithms in the literature, including First Fit, Virtual Machine Placement Ant Colony System, and Modified Best Fit Decreasing. The proposed scheme is tested using Amazon EC2 Instances and the result indicated that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms for various performance metrics.

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

With the application of cloud computing services in more and more fields, it will undertake more computing tasks and storage tasks. The problem of high energy consumption in data centers will become more serious. Virtualization technology is very important in cloud computing, which can improve the utilization rate of resources. At the same time, it has flexibility in resource scheduling and can integrate multiple virtual machines to achieve power efficiency. Using online virtual machine migration technology for energy-saving planning in cloud environment is a hot research topic in academic circles. The scheduling strategy proposed in this paper can reduce the server downtime and the number of server hosts, so as to achieve the maximum use of resources. The main research work of this paper includes the following aspects: Firstly, the energy consumption in the process of virtual machine energy-saving design is modeled, and the relationship between energy consumption and resource usage under different load conditions is analyzed, and the problems are abstracted, e.g., packaging box problem. Secondly, this paper uses genetic algorithm to solve the problem of high energy consumption. Finally, based on the target allocation scheme of virtual machines obtained by the above method, the migration problem of virtual machines is abstracted as the problem of finding the maximum weighted independent set of graphs. And a greedy algorithm is designed to solve this problem. In this paper, CloudSim simulation platform is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can reduce data energy consumption and avoid frequent migration of virtual machines.

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 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.

Cloud computing is an internet based computing technology that provide on demand computing for end users. Normally, data centers allocation for application on statically based. But today so many data centers have a problem how to reduce energy consumption? Due to increase use of cloud services and infrastructure by various cloud providers, uses of energy day by day increase that's why energy consumption increase lots. Large numbers of data centers that consume lots of energy which increase the level of co2. Hence there is need for green computing and for energy efficient management of cloud data center resources besides meeting the QoS constraints. Within a data center, maximum energy is consumed by cooling systems and ICT Infrastructure, particularly, the servers. So it is of utmost importance to optimize energy utilization in datac enter servers. In order to achieve this, we can leverage the power of virtualization which is intrinsic in Cloud Computing. Virtualization opens the doors for VM consolidation by allowing dynamic migration of virtual machines across physical machines. In this study, the problem of VM consolidation has been formulated as a mathematical optimization problem.