Live Placement of Interdependent Virtual Machines to Optimize Cloud Service Profits and Penalties on SLAs

Abstract

This paper aims to optimize cloud services' net profits and penalties with live placement of interdependent virtual machines (VMs). This optimization is a complex task as it is difficult to achieve a successful compromise between penalties and net profits on service level contracts. This paper studies this optimization problem to minimize services' penalties and maximizing net profits while achieving live migrations of interdependent VMs. This VM's live placement optimization problem is a NP-hard problem with exponential running time. A mathematical model was designed and approximations were conducted with an efficient PCH/PCH' heuristic. This Mixed Integer Non-Linear programming (MNLP) formulation and heuristic for cloud services was tested where the overall services' penalty needs to be minimized, overall net profits have to be maximized, and where efficient live migrations of VMs is a concern. Simulation results show how cloud providers may live place VMs. Finally, our results show that a PCH/PCH' heuristic: (i) finds better solutions than the existing machines' configuration of Google traces; (ii) is suitable for large-sized instances of cloud services; (iii) performs better than FF, FFD, and CPLEX in terms of overall penalties and net profits; and (iv) runs in less than six minutes over the last day's data.