Energy-Aware VM Consolidation Using Similarity-Driven Intelligence in Green Cloud Environments

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation in Cloud computing environments provides a great opportunity for energy saving. However, the obligation of providing suitable quality of service to end users leads to the necessity in dealing with energy-performance tradeoff. In this paper, we propose a redesigned energy-aware heuristic framework for VM consolidation to achieve a better energy-performance tradeoff. The main contribution of us is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation decision algorithm, which is used to decide a host is overload with SLA violation or not. Finally, we have evaluated our framework through simulation on large-scale experiments driven by workload traces from more than a thousand VMs, and the results show that our framework outperforms previous work, which has 11.8%~27% decrease in energy consumption, 57.9%~78.4% decrease in SLA violation, 63.2%~84.1% decrease in energy-performance metric which is a product metric of the energy consumption and SLA violation.

Cloud computing provides utility oriented services and pay-as-you-go computing model for its users. Massive adoption of Cloud services leads to build a sustainable environment and also demands for green Cloud services. With the advancement in Cloud services, the issue of carbon dioxide emission becomes significant. There is also a challenge for Cloud provider to satisfy the customer by guaranteeing the services with performance and availability in Service Level Agreement (SLA). Hence, energy consumption and SLA violation become important issues for Cloud providers. These issues can be addressed in many facets viz. efficient provisioning of resources, reducing energy consumption in datacenters, server consolidation, virtual machine (VM) migration, minimizing SLA violation or also by providing SLA with green requirements. In this paper, we survey various techniques which address green SLA with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements by using different resource management and consolidation procedures. Further, we propose our work by considering the multi-criteria method for resource management which selects the host as probable migration destination having highest predicted utilization after allocating a VM on the host. Hence, we aim to address the issue of maintaining the trade-off between energy consumption and SLA violation.

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.

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.

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

Dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation is a successful approach to improve the energy efficiency and the resource utilization in cloud environments. Consequently, optimizing the online energy-performance tradeoff directly influences quality of service. In this study, algorithms named as CPU Priority based Best-Fit Decreasing (CPBFD) and Dynamic CPU Priority based Best-Fit Decreasing (DCPBFD) are proposed for VM placement. A number of VM placement algorithms are implemented and compared with the proposed algorithms. The algorithms are evaluated through simulations with real-world workload traces and it is shown that the proposed algorithms outperform the known algorithms. The simulation results clearly show that CPBFD and DCPBFD provide the least service level agreement violations, least VM migrations, and efficient energy consumption.

Security-aware dynamic VM consolidation

A joint CPU-RAM energy efficient and SLA-compliant approach for cloud data centers

The Cloud Computing (CC) has vast amount of data centers that consists of many computing nodes and consumes a huge amount of electrical energy. Hence the researchers found that the high service-level agreements (SLAs) violations and Energy Consumption (EC) are the major challenging issues in CC. The various traditional approaches reduced the EC, but ignored the SLA violation during the selection of Virtual Machine (VM) from overloaded hosts. In order to effectively deal with these issues, this paper proposed the Recursive Ant Colony Optimization (RACO) in 2 different workloads. The main aim of the RACO is to minimize the high EC and SLA violations by the movement of best ant, which is random and identified the distance between their movements. The algorithm consists of 3 major steps includes tracking and updating the pheromone and finally city selection. The proposed method simulated on Cloud Sim to validate the efficiency and stability of the proposed RACO and their performance compared to that of other existing techniques. The results showed that RACO reduced the EC by 40 - 42 % (approx.) which is less than the traditional ACO algorithm in Planet Lab data. HIGHLIGHTS Reduced EC and SLA Violation of Data Center are done via RACO VM Allocations are done by IQR and utilises micro, small, medium and extra-large instances Pheromone Tracking, updating and city selection are the endeavours of RACO RACO reduced EC by 40 - 42 % and SLA Violation