Optimal Green Virtual Machine Migration Model

Abstract

Cloud computing provides the opportunity to migrate virtual machines to “follow-the-green” data centres. That is, to migrate virtual machines between green data centres on the basis of clean energy availability, to mitigate the environmental impact of carbon footprint emissions and energy consumption. The virtual machine migration problem can be modelled to maximize the utility of computing resources or minimizing the cost of using computing resources. However, this would ignore the network energy consumption and its impact on the overall CO2 emissions. Unless this is taken into account the extra data traffic due to migration of data could then cause an increase in brown energy consumption and eventually lead to an unintended increase in carbon footprint emissions. Energy consumption is a key aspect in deploying distributed service in cloud networks within decentralized service delivery architectures. In this paper, the authors address an optimization view of the problem of locating a set of cloud services on a set of sites green data centres managed by a service provider or hybrid cloud computing brokerage. The authors’ goal is to minimize the overall network energy consumption and carbon footprint emissions for accessing the cloud services for any pair of data centres i and j. The authors propose an optimization migration model based on the development of integer linear programming (ILP) models, to identify the leverage of green energy sources with data centres and the energy consumption of migrating VMs.