Virtual machine allocation strategy in energy-efficient cloud data centres

Abstract

Energy consumption is significant in cloud data centres even when some virtual machines (VMs) are idle. Taking into account both the energy efficiency and the response performance, we propose a VM allocation strategy with speed switch and VM consolidation in the cloud data centre. When the traffic is lighter, the processing speed of VMs in baseline module will be switched between a low speed and a high speed. When the traffic is much heavier, the VMs in reserved module will be consolidated with the VMs in baseline module, and operates at a high speed. We establish a two-dimensional Markov chain to mathematically estimate the energy-saving degree and the response performance. Numerical experiments with analysis and simulation show that our proposed VM allocation strategy can effectively reduce the energy consumption as well as guarantee the response performance.