Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Computing

We study the problem of virtual machine (VM) placement and migration in a data center. In the current approaches, VMs are assigned to physical servers using on-demand provisioning. Such an approach is simple but it often results in a poor performance due to resource fragmentation. Additionally, sub-optimal VM placement usually generates unneeded VM migration and unnecessary cross network traffic. The efficiency of a datacenter therefore significantly depends on how VMs are provisioned and where they are placed. A good placement scheme will not only improve the quality of service but also reduce the operation cost of the data center. In this paper, we study the problem of optimal VM placement and migration to minimize resource usage and power consumption in a data center. We formulate the optimization problem as a joint multiple objective function and solve it by leveraging the framework of convex optimization. Due to the intractable nature of the combinatorial optimization, we then propose Multi-level Join VM Placement and Migration (MJPM) algorithms based on the relaxed convex optimization framework to approximate the optimal solution. The theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms that substantially increases data center efficiency. In addition, our extensive simulation results on different practical topologies show significant performance improvement over the existing approaches.

Stochastic scheduling for variation-aware virtual machine placement in a cloud computing CPS

Virtualization is a key technology for resource sharing in IaaS/PaaS cloud infrastructures. One primary issue in virtualization is the virtual machine placement (VMP) problem, which is to choose proper physical machine (PM) to deploy virtual machines (VMs) in runtime. In this paper, we study the VMP problem with the goal of minimizing the total energy consumption. We first present a multi-dimensional space partition model to characterize the resource usage states of PMs. Based on this model, we then propose a virtual machine placement algorithm, which can balance the utilization of multi-dimensional resources, reduce the number of running PMs and thus lower down the energy consumption. We also evaluate our proposed balanced algorithm via extensive simulations. Simulation results show that our approach can save as much as 15% energy compared to the first fit algorithm over a long run.

Joint flow and virtual machine placement in hybrid cloud data centers

Energy efficiency is one of the important issues in green cloud data centers (DCs). In this context, a virtual machine (VM) placement is one of the important techniques which can be used to achieve energy efficiency in such environments. Bio-inspired optimization algorithms are widely used in the literature to solve the VM placement (VMP) problem and different types of them are benefited to achieve energy efficiency while meeting Quality of Service (QoS) and user-specified constraints such as deadlines and cost. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of the bio-inspired VMP schemes. For this purpose, we first provide the essential concepts regarding the VMP and describe various objectives and factors which can be considered in this process. Then, we provide a taxonomy of VMP schemes regarding their applied optimization algorithms and compare their employed factors in the VMP process as well as simulator environments and the metrics which have been utilized in the verification of the investigated VMP frameworks. Finally, the concluding remarks and future researches directions are provided.

The virtual machine placement problem can be described as designing optimal placement scheme for virtual machine in cloud environment. Cloud data centers are facing increasingly virtual machine placement problems, such as high energy consumption, imbalanced utilization of multidimensional resource, and high resource wastage rate. In this paper, typical exact and heuristic algorithms as solution to the virtual machine placement problem in the cloud are surveyed in terms of energy consumption and resource wastage. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of both the exact and approximate algorithms developed by using the WebCloudSim sytem.

Cloud computing is concept of computing technology in which user uses remote server for maintain their data and application. Resources in cloud computing are demand driven utilized in forms of virtual machines to facilitate the execution of complicated tasks. Virtual machine placement is the process of mapping virtual machines to physical machines. This is an active research topic and different strategies have been adopted in literature for this problem. In this paper, the problem of virtual machine placement is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem aiming to simultaneously optimize total processing resource wastage and total memory resource wastage. After that ant colony optimization algorithm is proposed for solving the formulated problem. The main goal of the proposed algorithm is to search the solution space more efficiently and obtain a set of non-dominated solutions called the Pareto set. The proposed algorithm has been compared with the well-known algorithms for virtual machine placement problem existing in the literature. The comparison results elucidate that the proposed algorithm is more efficient and significantly outperforms the compared methods on the basis of CPU resource wastage and memory resource wastage.

Virtualization is a key technology for mobile cloud computing (MCC) and the virtual machine (VM) is a core component of virtualization. VM provides a relatively independent running environment for different applications. Therefore, the VM placement problem focuses on how to place VMs on optimal physical machines, which ensures efficient use of resources and the quality of service, etc. Most previous work focuses on energy consumption, network traffic between VMs and so on and rarely consider the delay for end users’ requests. In contrast, the latency between requests and VMs is considered in this paper for the scenario of optimal VM placement in MCC. In order to minimize average RTT for all requests, the round-trip time (RTT) is first used as the metric for the latency of requests. Based on our proposed RTT metric, an RTT-Aware VM placement algorithm is then proposed to minimize the average RTT. Furthermore, the case in which one of the core switches does not work is considered. A VM rescheduling algorithm is proposed to keep the average RTT lower and reduce the fluctuation of the average RTT. Finally, in the simulation study, our algorithm shows its advantage over existing methods, including random placement, the traffic-aware VM placement algorithm and the remaining utilization-aware algorithm.

Cloud computing data centers contain a large number of physical machines (PMs) and virtual machine (VMs). This number can increase the energy consumption of the data centers especially when the VMs placed inappropriately on the PMs. This paper presents a new VM placement approach with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of a data center. VM placement problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. Since this problem has been proven to be an NP hard problem, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is adopted to solve the formulated problem. Information heuristic of ACO is used differently based on PM energy efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed approach scales well on large data centers and significantly outperforms selected benchmark (ACOVMP) in terms of energy consumption.

In this paper, we consider virtual machine (VM) placement problem for cloud data centers. Different from previous works, the VMs considered need to be conducted within a finite duration. However, due to the limited resource at physical machines (PMs), the VM may be unable to place on a single PM within duration. To make sure the successful placement, the VM may undergo several PMs for service, e.g., it is run on one PM at this time, while migrated to another PM next time. Migrating the VM from one PM to another incurs extra cost, e.g., the bandwidth. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem, which maximizes the revenue of successfully placing the VMs, and minimizes the total number of migrations for the VMs. We prove it is NP-hard, and show that the minimum number of migrations for each VM under the resource constraint of PMs is equivalent to finding a shortest path problem. We then design a heuristic algorithm, which considers both the revenue and the minimum number of migrations required for the VM. We also design a 1 over 2-approximation algorithm for a special case of the problem. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through simulations.

Cloud providers generally run one or more Virtual Machine (VM) instances on the same physical machine. Though it increases data center utilization, it exposes VM to a co-location attack. VM placement and migration are the two strategies adopted for mitigating co-locations. Current methods for VM placement or VM migration consider only security as decision criteria and do not consider other factors like Quality-of-Service degradation, data center utilization, etc. This work proposes a placement and migration strategy for mitigation of co-location attacks with joint consideration of multi objectives like QoS, data center utilization, energy consumption, and security risks. A security-driven multi-criteria optimization -based VM placement policy is proposed. A joint consideration of multiobjective performance optimization along with co-location security risk minimization is done to design a novel VM placement policy based on user categorization. The policy can reduce the likelihood of co-location target VM with attacker VM without much degradation to the performance of VM and data center utilization. The solution mitigates co-location risks without much compromise to the performance of VM and data center resource utilization. The co-residence risk is mitigated by the categorization of users into three levels i.e. unlabeled, risky, and safe, and physical machines into two groups as safe and unsafe. The PMs available in data center is grouped into three different VM placement policies, they are undecided pool, safe pool and unsafe pool.

As more and more applications migrate into clouds, the placement of virtual machines for these applications has much impact on the performance of cloud systems. A number of virtual machine (VM) placement techniques have been proposed over recent years. However, most of the existing works on VM placement ignore the response latency of the requests from tenants. In this paper, we investigate the techniques of VM placement with stochastic requests from the tenants to minimize the total (average) response latency. We first model the requests for each application from the corresponding tenant as independent Poisson stream. Moreover, the VMs are modeled as simple M/M/1 queueing systems. Then, we define the problem of VM placement for minimizing the total response delay (VMMD) and show it is NP-hard. We propose three heuristic algorithms, namely, Greedy, Local Adjustment (LA) and Simulated Annealing (SA). We conduct abundant simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are efficient in decreasing the total response latency of the requests from tenants. Especially, the SA heuristic, which decreases the total response latency about 68% at most, shows the best performance on minimizing the total response latency in cloud systems.

IaaS has become one of the most dominant features that cloud computing offers by providing access to computing resources in a virtualized environment. IaaS enables datacenter's hardware to get virtualized using virtualization, which allows Cloud providers to create multiple Virtual Machine (VMs) instances on a single physical machine, thus improving resource utilization and increasing the Return on Investment (ROI). The placement of VMs among hosts is interpreted as a bin packing problem in most of the time. In this work, we have implemented some of the bin packing solutions to address these VM placement problems. We ran our simulation on a cloud computing simulation toolkit known as CloudSim using Planet Lab workload data.

A solution of dynamic VMs placement problem for energy consumption optimization based on evolutionary game theory

Based on the convex optimization theory, the energy-efficient and scalability problems of modern data centers are studied. Then a novel application-aware virtual machine (VM) placement algorithm is proposed to cope with these problems. Firstly, the definition of VM placement fairness and utility function are given, and the basic algorithm of VM placement which fulfills server constraints of physical machines is con-ducted. Secondly, we formulate the VM placement as an optimization problem. A two-tier algorithm that efficiently solves the VM placement problem in large scale was designed. Comparing to existing methods, we illustrate the performance improvement such as reducing the number of physical machines efficiently, decreasing communication distance between VMs, improving energy-efficient and scalability of data centers.