Energy efficient VM scheduling and routing in multi-tenant cloud data center

Abstract

Cloud data center hosting many composite applications of multiple tenants consumes a massive amount of energy. Developing energy efficient mechanisms for data center management has become a vital issue for the cloud providers. Most of the works that deal with mechanisms for energy-efficient resource provisioning focus either on reducing the energy consumption of servers or reducing the energy consumption of network elements, but not both. We have formulated the problem of jointly optimizing the energy consumption of servers and network elements by optimal VM scheduling and routing as an integer programming problem. To solve it a phase-wise optimization approach with two ant colony based meta-heuristic algorithms is proposed. The topology features of the data center network and the communication patterns of the applications are considered in the construction of the solution. The solution is tested for three standard data center networks, 3-tier, B-Cube and Hyper-tree of different sizes and compared against two standard algorithms, first-fit and round-robin algorithms. The results showed that the proposed solution improves energy savings by 15% and 20% on an average when compared with first-fit and round-robin respectively.