Energy-Aware Virtual Machine Scheduling on Data Centers with Heterogeneous Bandwidths

Abstract

Ethernet is the main choice of connectivity in data centers operating in clouds. The Ethernet standards body (IEEE 802.3) has generated Ethernet specifications with increasing transmission rates since its inception. As a result, it is observed that data centers with groups of physical hosts having heterogeneous bandwidths. In this paper, we present an energy-aware virtual machine’s scheduling method, taking into account this heterogeneity while aiming at energy efficiency. This method consists of two algorithms: one to determine to which physical hosts virtual machines should be allocated, and the other for the provision of bandwidth on physical hosts to virtual machines. Our study shows that, regarding energy savings for the studied scenarios, the presented method is comparable to other energy-aware methods in data centers with groups of machines with homogeneous settings, surpassing them in groups of machines with heterogeneous configurations, bringing improvements especially to data centers with heterogeneous bandwidths’ networks or to where restrictive SLAs are used for the provision of bandwidth to virtual machines.