An energy-efficient load balance strategy based on virtual machine consolidation in cloud environment

Abstract

In the cloud computing environment, unbalanced utilization of multi-dimensional resources in physical servers generates resource fragmentation, leading to inefficient resource utilization and energy wastage in data centers. The inefficient utilization of resources makes high energy consumption and low quality of service (QoS) in resource management an urgent problem to be solved. We propose a load balancing strategy based on virtual machine consolidation (LBVMC), which aims to reduce the energy consumption and service level agreement (SLA) violation of data centers by balancing the multi-dimensional resource utilization in physical machines (PMs). First, we present a load state classification algorithm for PMs with load abnormality considering current and future loads to reduce unnecessary virtual machine (VM) migrations caused by occasional load fluctuations. Then, we propose a resource-weight based selection model for migratable VMs, which selects appropriate VMs to be migrated based on multi-dimensional resource utilization, and reduces resource fragmentation caused by load imbalance. Finally, we design a VM placement algorithm based on resource fitness and load correlation to deploy VMs on the optimal destination PMs to assure load balancing of the destination PMs after VM placement. We perform simulated experiments under homogeneous, heterogeneous, and bottleneck resource environments. Experimental results show that LBVMC is superior to other strategies in reducing energy consumption and SLA violations and achieves better overall performance.