Towards optimal virtual machine placement methods in cloud environments

Abstract

The rapid growth of cloud services for hosting applications in the scientific, commercial, web, and social networks has led to enormous growth in the number of large-scale data centers. By shifting the costs of data center maintenance, hardware, and software from customers to service providers using a pay-as-you-go policy, service providers and customers are benefited. On the other hand, the massive growth of data centers has been accompanied by challenges that have limited the boundaries of this technology. Thus, researchers in this field tend to focus on eliminating these limitations. Since virtualization is at the core of cloud computing, allocating Virtual Machines (VMs) to physical hosts in the Infrastructure as a Service layer (IaaS) is one of the most significant challenges. Nonetheless, the VM allocation problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that is known to be NP-Hard. In this paper, we presented a comprehensive analysis of virtual machine placement problem and outlined different approaches to solving it. This paper aims to provide insight into the challenges and issues for recent virtual machine placement strategies. The current study aims to comprehensively classify the physical resource allocation for VMs by overviewing available trends.