Latency-aware joint virtual machine and policy consolidation for mobile edge computing

Dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation dynamically adapts VM resource allocation to resource demands promising significant cost benefits for highly variable enterprise workloads. In this work, we analyze large enterprise workloads with the goal of understanding how effective are the VM consolidation variants in real world. We observe that burstiness in memory demand is much lower than the burstiness in CPU demand. Further, memory is the more constrained resource in virtualized servers, significantly reducing the potential gains due to dynamic consolidation. We study consolidation planning in four very large data centers and observe that the savings in facilities cost due to dynamic consolidation over static consolidation is not as large as estimated by past studies. Further, the savings over intelligent semi-static consolidation are surprisingly modest in most cases, putting a question mark over the applicability of dynamic consolidation in real world.

Virtual machines raise the abstraction level of the execution environment at the cost of restricting the set of supported languages. Moreover, the ability of a language implementation to integrate with other languages hosted on the same virtual machine typically constrains the features of the language. In this paper, we present a highly flexible yet efficient approach to hosting multiple programming languages on an objectoriented virtual machine. Our approach is based on extending the interface of each class with language-specific wrapper methods, offering each language a tailored view of a given class. This approach can be deployed both on a statically typed virtual machine, such as the JVM, and on a dynamic virtual machine, such as a Smalltalk virtual machine. We have implemented our approach to language interoperability on top of a prototype virtual machine for embedded systems based on the Smalltalk object model, which provides interoperability for embedded versions of the Smalltalk, Java, and BETA programming languages. (Less)

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

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 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.

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).

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.

Cloud Computing has become the most popular distributed computing environment because it does not require any user level management and controlling on the low-level implementation of the system. However, efficient resource provisioning is a key challenge for cloud computing and resolving such kind of problem can reduce under or over utilization of resources, increase user satisfaction by serving more users during peak hours, reduce implementation cost for providers and service cost for users. Existing works on cloud computing focuses to accurate estimation of the capacity needs, static or dynamic VM (Virtual Machine) creation and scheduling. But significant amount of time is required to create and destroy VMs which could be used to serve more user requests. In this paper, an adaptive QoS (Quality of Service) aware VM provisioning mechanism is developed that ensures efficient utilization of the system resources. The VM for similar type of requests has been recycled so that the VM creation time can be minimized and used to serve more user requests. In the proposed model, QoS is ensured by serving all the tasks within the requirements described in SLA. Tasks are separated using multilevel queue and the most urgent task is given high priority. The simulation-based experimental results shows that a great number of tasks can be served compared to others which will help to satisfy customers during the peak hour.

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.

In virtualized datacenters (vDCs), dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is used as one of the most common techniques to achieve both energy-and resource-utilization efficiency. Live migrations of VMs are used for dynamic consolidation but due to dynamic resource demand variation of VMs may lead to frequent and non-optimal migrations. Assuming deterministic workload of the VMs may ensure the most energy/resource-efficient VM allocations but eventually may lead to significant resource contention or under-utilization if the workload varies significantly over time. On the other hand, adopting a conservative approach by allocating VMs depending on their peak demand may lead to low utilization, if the peak occurs infrequently or for a short period of time. Therefore, in this work we design a robust VM migration scheme that strikes a balance between protection for resource contention and additional energy costs due to powering on more servers while considering uncertainties on VMs resource demands. We use the theory of Gamma robustness and derive a robust Mixed Integer Linear programming (MILP) formulation. Due to the complexity, the problem is hard to solve for online optimization and we propose a novel heuristic based on Tabu Search. Using several scenarios, we show that that the proposed heuristic can achieve near optimal solution qualities in a short time and scales well with the instance sizes. Moreover, we quantitatively analyze the trade-off between energy cost versus protection level and robustness.

Internet, since the beginning of its work, has undergone many changes one of the latest changes is how the internet cloud computing. New technologies cloud computing offers because of features all kinds of facilities to the users as a service. Each evolution, change and novel concept in the world of technologies has its own problems and complications. Accordingly, benefiting from cloud computing is no exception to this rule and it has challenged researchers and proponents in this research domain. Indeed, some major challenges in cloud computing are: load balancing, safety, reliability, ownership, data backup, data portability and supporting several platforms. One challenge for such matters in the field of cloud computing is load balancing optimization in the cloud. The so-called cloud computing, including virtualization, distributed computing, networking, software and Web services. With respect to the ever increasing significance of load balancing in cloud computing the researchers in this paper intended to improve load balancing by using a novel method. The related studies were reviewed, evaluated and compared with each other. The efficiency of the proposed method was analyzed and compared with those of other studies. The results of the present study revealed that the proposed method is better than other dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation algorithms in terms of reducing SLA (service levels agreement) violation and the amount of transmitted data volume transmission has to present a better performance than other methods.

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.

Virtualization is a crucial technology of cloud computing to enable the flexible use of a significant amount of distributed computing services on a pay-as-you-go basis. As the service demand continuingly increases to a global scale, efficient virtual machine consolidation becomes more and more imperative. Existing heuristic algorithms targeted mostly at minimizing either the rate of service level agreement violations or the energy consumption of the cloud. However, the communication overhead among different virtual machines and the decision time of virtual machine consolidation are rarely considered. To reduce both the over-utilized nodes and the under-utilized nodes with the consideration of migration cost, communication overhead, and energy consumption, this paper presents a new iterative budget algorithm in which a budget heuristic and a multi-stage selection strategy are designed to find suitable migration objects and targets simultaneously. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm provides a substantial improvement over other typical heuristics and metaheuristic algorithms in reducing the energy consumption, the number of migrated virtual machines, the overall communication overhead, as well as the decision time.

The efficient migration of virtual machines (VMs) is critical for optimizing resource management, ensuring service continuity, and enhancing resiliency in cloud and edge computing environments, particularly as 6G networks demand higher reliability and lower latency. This study addresses the challenges of dynamically balancing server loads while minimizing downtime and migration costs under stochastic task arrivals and variable processing times. We propose a queuing theory-based model employing continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) to capture the interplay between VM migration decisions, server resource constraints, and task processing dynamics. The model incorporates two migration policies—one minimizing projected post-migration server utilization and another prioritizing current utilization—to evaluate their impact on system performance. The numerical results show that the blocking probability for the first VM for Policy 1 is 2.1% times lower than for Policy 2 and the same metric for the second VM is 4.7%. The average server’s resource utilization increased up to 11.96%. The framework’s adaptability to diverse server–VM configurations and stochastic demands demonstrates its applicability to real-world cloud systems. These results highlight predictive resource allocation’s role in dynamic environments. Furthermore, the study lays the groundwork for extending this framework to multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments, which are integral to 6G networks.