Simple estimation and energy‐aware migration models of virtual machines in a server cluster

Abstract

SummaryIn order to realize green society, it is critical to reduce electric energy consumed by servers in clusters. In our previous studies, these types of algorithms are proposed to select an energy‐efficient server to perform an application process issued by a client. In this paper, we newly discuss a migration approach to reducing the electric energy consumption of servers where virtual machines with application processes migrate to more energy‐efficient servers. We propose a new algorithm called ISEAM2 to reduce the electric energy consumption of servers. Here, a pair of a host server and a virtual machine on the host server are first selected to perform a process issued by an application. In addition, a target virtual machine on a host server and a guest server to which the target virtual machine migrates are selected so that the electric energy consumption of the host and guest servers can be minimized. Thus, virtual machines with application processes migrate to more energy‐efficient servers. We also propose a simple way to estimate the termination time of every process on each server. In the evaluation, we show the total electric energy consumption and total active time of servers, and the average execution time of processes can be reduced in the ISEAM2 algorithm compared with other algorithms.