Dynamic Virtual Machine Consolidation Research Articles

EAMA: Efficient Adaptive Migration Algorithm for Cloud Data Centers (CDCs)

The rapid demand for Cloud services resulted in the establishment of large-scale Cloud Data Centers (CDCs), which ultimately consume a large amount of energy. An enormous amount of energy consumption eventually leads to high operating costs and carbon emissions. To reduce energy consumption with efficient resource utilization, various dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation approaches (i.e., Predictive Anti-Correlated Placement Algorithm (PACPA), Resource-Utilization-Aware Energy Efficient (RUAEE), Memory-bound Pre-copy Live Migration (MPLM), m Mixed migration strategy, Memory/disk operation aware Live VM Migration (MLLM), etc.) have been considered. Most of these techniques do aggressive VM consolidation that eventually results in performance degradation of CDCs in terms of resource utilization and energy consumption. In this paper, an Efficient Adaptive Migration Algorithm (EAMA) is proposed for effective migration and placement of VMs on the Physical Machines (PMs) dynamically. The proposed approach has two distinct features: first, selection of PM locations with optimum access delay where the VMs are required to be migrated, and second, reduces the number of VM migrations. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted using the CloudSim toolkit. The results of the proposed approach are compared with the PACPA and RUAEE algorithms in terms of Service-Level Agreement (SLA) violation, resource utilization, number of hosts shut down, and energy consumption. Results show that proposed EAMA approach significantly reduces the number of migrations by 16% and 24%, SLA violation by 20% and 34%, and increases the resource utilization by 8% to 17% with increased number of hosts shut down from 10% to 13% as compared to the PACPA and RUAEE, respectively. Moreover, a 13% improvement in energy consumption has also been observed.

Interval-valued Fuzzy Logic approach for overloaded hosts in consolidation of virtual machines in cloud computing

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is an effective way to improve resource utilization and power efficiency in cloud computing. For example, determining when it is best to relocate VMs from an overloaded host is one aspect of dynamic VM consolidation that directly influences the resource utilization and Quality of Service (QoS) offered by the system. This paper presents a new proposal with an Interval-valued Fuzzy Logic approach to address the uncertainties and inaccuracies in determining resource usage, aiming at energy savings with minimal performance degradation. The results obtained in a simulated cloud computing environment showed improvements for energy efficiency of 2.3% with Inter Quartile Range (IQR). With regard to Service Level Agreement (SLA), results of 10.1% were achieved with Threshold Policy (THR), and finally, IQR obtained 7.9% better results considering the reduction in the number of VM migrations.

An approach towards development of new linear regression prediction model for reduced energy consumption and SLA violation in the domain of green cloud computing

With the increase of mega-cities, the demand for Smart Cities is overgrowing. The mega-cities can be smarter through the Cloud of Things (CoT). Efficient energy consumption in Smart Cities has a massive impact on the environment. But, computational power is increasing rapidly in the cloud computing environment. Enormous energy consumption (EC) and Service Level Agreement violation (SLAV) becomes a key concern. The Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation approach can significantly reduce EC, SLA violation (SLAV), and increase resource utilization. However, dynamic VM consolidation may produce performance degradation of Physical Machines (PMs) and SLAV. Therefore, it becomes essential to find a trade-off between EC and SLAV. Herein, a novel New Linear Regression(NLR) prediction model, host overload/underload, and VM placement policy have been proposed to reduce EC and SLAV. The NLR model’s primary intention is to take that the model goes through a straight line and a mean point. Future CPU utilization is predicted based on the proposed NLR model. Evaluation of proposed algorithms has been accomplished by extending CloudSim Simulator. The experiment shows that proposed algorithms reduced EC and SLAV in cloud data centers and can be used to construct a smart and sustainable environment for Smart Cities.

Managing overloaded hosts for energy-efficiency in cloud data centers

Traditional data centers are shifted toward the cloud computing paradigm. These data centers support the increasing demand for computational and data storage that consumes a massive amount of energy at a huge cost to the cloud service provider and the environment. Considerable energy is wasted to constantly operate idle virtual machines (VMs) on hosts during periods of low load. Dynamic consolidation of VMs from overloaded or underloaded hosts is an effective strategy for improving energy consumption and resource utilization in cloud data centers. The dynamic consolidation of VM from an overloaded host directly influences the service level agreements (SLAs), utilization of resources, and quality of service (QoS) delivered by the system. We proposed an algorithm, namely, GradCent, based on the Stochastic Gradient Descent technique. This algorithm is used to develop an upper CPU utilization threshold for detecting overloaded hosts by using a real CPU workload. Moreover, we proposed a dynamic VM selection algorithm called Minimum Size Utilization (MSU) for selecting the VMs from an overloaded host for VM consolidation. GradCent and MSU maintain the trade-off between energy consumption minimization and QoS maximization under specified SLA goal. We used the CloudSim simulations with real-world workload traces from more than a thousand PlanetLab VMs. The proposed algorithms minimized energy consumption and SLA violation by 23% and 27.5% on average, compared with baseline schemes, respectively.

A dynamic VM consolidation approach based on load balancing using Pearson correlation in cloud computing

In recent years, cloud data centers are rapidly growing with a large number of finite heterogeneous resources to meet the ever-growing user demands with respect to the SLA (service level agreement). However, the potential growth in the number of large-scale data centers leads to large amounts of energy consumption, which is constantly a major challenge. In addition to this challenge, intensive number of VM (virtual machine) migrations can decrease the performance of cloud data centers. Thus, how to minimize energy consumption while satisfying SLA and minimizing the number of VM migrations becomes an important challenge classified as NP-hard optimization problem in data centers. Most VM scheduling schemes have been proposed for this problem, such as dynamic VM consolidation. However, most of them failed in low time complexity and optimal solution. Hence, this paper proposes a dynamic VM consolidation approach-based load balancing to minimize the trade-off between energy consumption, SLA violations and VM migrations while keeping minimum host shutdowns and low time complexity in heterogeneous environment. Specifically, the proposed approach consists of four methods which include: BPSO meta-heuristic-based load balancing to impact on energy consumption and number of host shutdowns, overloading host detection and VM placement-based Pearson correlation coefficient to impact on SLA, and VM selection based on imbalance degree to impact on number of VM migration. Moreover, Pearson correlation coefficient and imbalance degree correlate CPU, RAM and bandwidth, respectively, in each host and each VM. Through extensive analysis and simulation experiments using real PlanetLab and random workloads, the performance results demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits excellent results for the NP-problem.

Green Cloud Software Engineering for Big Data Processing

Internet of Things (IoT) coupled with big data analytics is emerging as the core of smart and sustainable systems which bolsters economic, environmental and social sustainability. Cloud-based data centers provide high performance computing power to analyze voluminous IoT data to provide invaluable insights to support decision making. However, multifarious servers in data centers appear to be the black hole of superfluous energy consumption that contributes to 23% of the global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) industry. IoT-related energy research focuses on low-power sensors and enhanced machine-to-machine communication performance. To date, cloud-based data centers still face energy–related challenges which are detrimental to the environment. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is a well-known approach to affect energy-efficient cloud infrastructures. Although several research works demonstrate positive results for VM consolidation in simulated environments, there is a gap for investigations on real, physical cloud infrastructure for big data workloads. This research work addresses the gap of conducting real physical cloud infrastructure-based experiments. The primary goal of setting up a real physical cloud infrastructure is for the evaluation of dynamic VM consolidation approaches which include integrated algorithms from existing relevant research. An open source VM consolidation framework, Openstack NEAT is adopted and experiments are conducted on a Multi-node Openstack Cloud with Apache Spark as the big data platform. Open sourced Openstack has been deployed because it enables rapid innovation, and boosts scalability as well as resource utilization. Additionally, this research work investigates the performance based on service level agreement (SLA) metrics and energy usage of compute hosts. Relevant results concerning the best performing combination of algorithms are presented and discussed.

Security-aware dynamic VM consolidation

The explosive growth of cloud usage encourages several challenges, especially high energy consumption of Cloud Data Centers (CDCs), new security risks to Virtual Machines (VMs) resulting from co-residency with other risky VMs on the same Physical Machine (PM), and the Quality of Service (QoS) degradation due to sharing resources. Many recent studies have proposed Dynamic VM Consolidation (DVMC) to save energy with minimum degradation of the QoS. However, due to the lack of reliable security measurements and consolidating VMs without any awareness of their security risk degrees, the overall security risk of the CDC may be increased. To tackle these challenges, this study presents a Security-aware DVMC (SDVMC) that consists of a Security Monitoring Module (SMM) and a SDVMC module. The SMM utilizes a three-dimensional security assessment model, while in the SDVMC module we propose a novel VM placement algorithm called Minimum Risk Increase (MRI) with Risk Increase Threshold (RITH). The proposed MRI with RITH VM placement algorithm selects the host that leads to minimum risk increase to the overall security risk while maintaining the risk increase for each VM does not exceed the value of the proposed RITH constraint; which is set according to the aims of the cloud provider. Simulation results show that using our approach with RITH 0.8 results in security improvement, overall risk was decreased by 2% to 5%, without negative impact on energy consumption or QoS. Moreover, using our approach with RITH less than 0.8 enables the tradeoff between energy consumption and the overall security risk. The maximum overall risk decrease ranged from 10% up to 40%, according to the intensive of the communication overhead between the VMs, while the used energy in its maximum was less than half if we used a non-power-ware VM allocation policy.

Int-FLBCC: Model for Load Balancing in Cloud Computing using Fuzzy Logic Type-2 and Admissible Orders.

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is an effective way to improve resource utilization and power efficiency in cloud computing, directly affecting Quality of Service aspects. This paper presents Int-FLBCC, a new proposal with exploring a Type-2 Fuzzy Logic approach to address the uncertainties and inaccuracies in determining resource usage, aiming at energy savings with minimal performance degradation. Validation results in a simulated cloud computing environment showed improvements in energy efficiency of 8.83% with IQR_XY and 22.43% with MAD_XY. For fulfillment of Service Level Agreements (SLA), the best values achieved were 9.06% with MAD_XY and 25% of THR_Lex1.

PCVM.ARIMA: predictive consolidation of virtual machines applying ARIMA method

Cloud computing adopts virtualization technology, including migration and consolidation of virtual machines, to overcome resource utilization problems and minimize energy consumption. Most of the approaches have focused on minimizing the number of physical machines and rarely have devoted attention to minimizing the number of migrations. They also decide based on the current resources utilization without considering the demand for resources in the future. Some approaches minimize the number of active physical machines and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations with the number of unnecessary migrations. They consider the current resource utilization of physical machines and neglect from demands for future resource requirements. As a result, as time passes, the number of unnecessary migrations, and subsequently, the rate of SLA violations in data centers increases. Alternatively, several approaches only focus on a hardware level and reduce the physical machine’s dynamic power consumption. The lack of control over the overload of physical machines increases the amount of violation. In this paper, a framework called PCVM.ARIMA is presented that focuses on the dynamic consolidation of virtual machines over the minimum number of physical machines, minimize the number of unnecessary migrations, detect the physical machine overloading, and SLA based on the ARIMA prediction model. Moreover, the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique is used to apply the optimal frequency to heterogeneous physical machines. The experimental results show that the presented framework significantly reduces energy consumption while it improves the QoS factors in comparison to some baseline methods.

Adaptive virtual machine consolidation framework based on performance-to-power ratio in cloud data centers

Efficient resource management in a Cloud data center relies on minimizing energy consumption and utilizing physical resource efficiently while maintaining the service-level agreement (SLA) at its highest level. To achieve this goal, dynamically consolidating virtual machines (VMs) is considered a promising method, because it eliminates the hotspots resulting from overloaded hosts and switches the underloaded hosts to sleep mode through the live migration of VMs. However, during the consolidation, each VM migration consumes additional resource, leading to performance degradation and SLA violation. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel adaptive performance-to-power-ratio (PPR)-aware dynamic VM consolidation framework based on both the predicted resource utilization and PPR of the heterogeneous hosts to resolve the trade-off of performance and energy. The proposed framework consists of four stages: (1) host overload detection based on residual available computing capacity; (2) selection of the appropriate VMs for migration from the overloaded hosts based on minimum data transfer; (3) host underload detection based on multi-criteria Z-score approach; (4) allocating the VMs selected for migration from the overloaded and underloaded hosts based on the modified power-aware best-fit decreasing algorithm. To validate the reliability and scalability of the proposed method, we performed experimental evaluation in both real and simulated environments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can reduce the energy consumption effectively and ensure maximal conformity to the quality of service (QoS) requirements across heterogeneous infrastructures, in comparison with the existing competitive approaches.

Prediction-based underutilized and destination host selection approaches for energy-efficient dynamic VM consolidation in data centers

Improving the energy efficiency while guaranteeing quality of services (QoS) is one of the main challenges of efficient resource management of large-scale data centers. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation is a promising approach that aims to reduce the energy consumption by reallocating VMs to hosts dynamically. Previous works mostly have considered only the current utilization of resources in the dynamic VM consolidation procedure, which imposes unnecessary migrations and host power mode transitions. Moreover, they select the destinations of VM migrations with conservative approaches to keep the service-level agreements , which is not in line with packing VMs on fewer physical hosts. In this paper, we propose a regression-based approach that predicts the resource utilization of the VMs and hosts based on their historical data and uses the predictions in different problems of the whole process. Predicting future utilization provides the opportunity of selecting the host with higher utilization for the destination of a VM migration, which leads to a better VMs placement from the viewpoint of VM consolidation. Results show that our proposed approach reduces the energy consumption of the modeled data center by up to 38% compared to other works in the area, guaranteeing the same QoS. Moreover, the results show a better scalability than all other approaches. Our proposed approach improves the energy efficiency even for the largest simulated benchmarks and takes less than 5% time overhead to execute for a data center with 7600 physical hosts.

Dynamic virtual machine consolidation using a multi-agent system to optimise energy efficiency in cloud computing

Cloud computing has seen rapid growth in the last decade, as a result of this there is an increasing concern about the energy requirement of cloud data centres. One approach to tackle this issue is dynamic virtual machine consolidation (DVMC) where virtual machines (VMs) are packed into fewer hosts, while hosts which have no VMs are placed into a hibernate mode. DVMC is traditionally solved with strategies that build on centralised topologies. One disadvantage of these solutions is that they don′t scale well in very large data centres as the manager node becomes a bottleneck and a single point of failure. The nature of the problem lends itself to a decentralised solution which is preferred over a centralised one when a problem is: inherently modular, large in scale, in a very dynamic environment, and when communication channels can experience message delays and loss. We propose Gossip Contracts (GC), a new multi-agent framework for crafting decentralised co-operation strategies. GC is inspired by the Gossip and Contract Net protocols. Using GC we developed a GC-based DVMC strategy and compared it to two popular strategies: Sercon, a centralised strategy, and ecoCloud, a distributed strategy. One of the comparison experiments uses Google cluster-usage traces; a dataset of real usage data from a Google data centre. The GC-based strategy performs best with respect to SLA Violations, and is similar to or outperforms other strategies with respect to power consumption. By its decentralised nature, GC does not have a single point of failure.

An approach toward design and development of an energy-aware VM selection policy with improved SLA violation in the domain of green cloud computing

With the rapid demand for service-oriented computing in association with the growth of cloud computing technologies, large-scale virtualized data centers have been established throughout the globe. These huge data centers consume power at a large scale that results in a high operational cost. The massive carbon footprint from the energy generators is another great issue to deal global warming. It is essential to lower the rate of carbon emission and energy consumption as much as possible. The live-migration-enabled dynamic virtual machine consolidation results in high energy saving. But it also incurs the violation of service level agreement (SLA). Excessive migration may lead to performance degradation and SLA violation. The process of VM selection for migration plays a vital role in the domain of energy-aware cloud computing. Using VM selection policies, VMs are selected for migration. A new power-aware VM selection policy has been proposed in this research that helps in VM selection for migration. The proposed power-aware VM selection policy has been further evaluated using trace-based simulation environment.

Nash equilibrium based replacement of virtual machines for efficient utilization of cloud data centers

Workload uncertainty has been increased with the integration of the Internet of Things to the computing grid i.e. edge computing and cloud data centers. Therefore, efficient resource utilization in cloud data centers become more challenging. Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines on optimal number of processing machines can increase the efficiency of resource utilization in cloud data centers. This process requires the migration of virtual machines from the under-utilized and over-utilized processing machines to other suitable machines. In this work, the problem of efficient replacement of virtual machines is solved using a game theory based well known technique, Nash Equilibrium (NE). We designed a nash equilibrium based dual on two players, over-load manager and under-load manager, to deduce the dominant strategy profiles for various scenarios during consolidation cycles. Dominant strategy profile is the set of strategies where every player has no incentive in deviation, thus leading to equilibrium position. A virtual machines redeployment algorithm, Nash Equilibrium based Virtual Machines Replacement (NE-VMR), has been proposed on the basis of the dominant strategy profiles for efficient consolidation. Experiment results show that NE-VMR is a more efficient server consolidation technique, saved 30% energy and improved 35% quality of service as compared to baselines.

Energy-efficient and Dynamic Consolidation of Virtual Machines in OpenStack-based Private Cloud

Abstract Dynamic Virtual Machines (VMs) consolidation is an efficient technique for enhancing resource utilization and reducing energy consumption by the physical servers. Over-utilized host affects the degradation of resource utilization and VM performance. Determining when it is best to migrate VMs from an over-utilized host to an under-utilized host is the aim of dynamic Live VM Migration (LVM). It influences the resource utilization and Quality of Services (QoS) offered by cloud providers. In the OpenStack cloud, LVM is done manually, and it uses first-fit as a default migration technique, which is not efficient for resource utilization. The paper proposes a novel approach for the dynamic consolidation of VMs in the OpenStack cloud. The CPU utilization, RAM utilization, and the number of instances of each host are monitored over a period of time, and overload detection of a host is carried out using the SVM classification model. The Load balancing consolidation is performed based on the SVM classification result. Further, an energy-efficient consolidation achieved to optimize the energy of physical servers. We carry out the performance analysis of the proposed work in the OpenStack-based real-time testbed of five-node. The result reveals the fair distribution of load within the servers and the significant benefits of energy-efficient VM consolidation resulting up to 15% energy savings.

Performance-to-Power Ratio Aware Resource Consolidation Framework Based on Reinforcement Learning in Cloud Data Centers

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is presented as a significant technique of energy conservation in cloud environments, which can eliminate the hotspot of overloaded hosts and switch the under loaded hosts to sleep mode through live migration of virtual machines. However, since the fact that migrating VM consumes a certain amount of extra resources, the process of reallocation can cause Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. In this paper, a novel proactive framework which considers both predicted resource utilization and Performance-to-power Ratio (PPR) of heterogeneous hosts is proposed to perform dynamic VM consolidation to achieve balance of performance and energy. More precisely, a workload predictor is proposed based on the modified Weighted Moving Average (WMA) algorithm, representing the support for dynamic resource allocation; a cluster controller is proposed based on reinforcement learning for exploring the optimal matching relationship between resource requests and host at different PPR levels; a resource allocator is designed based on greedy strategy for achieving the trade-off between energy consumption and application performance across the cluster. Moreover, the framework is implemented based on distributed architecture and off-line learning pattern, which are able to not only scale up quickly but also improve the computing efficiency of the system. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we have performed experimental evaluation on CloudSim with real-world workload traces of PlanetLab, and the simulation results demonstrate that it reduces the energy consumption up to 45.25% and effectively deals with high Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and heterogeneous distributed infrastructures in comparison with other competitive approaches.

PAPSO: A Power-Aware VM Placement Technique Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

With the widespread usage of cloud computing to benefit from its services, cloud service providers have invested in constructing large scale data centers. Consequently, a tremendous increase in energy consumption has arisen in conjunction with its results, including a remarkable rise in costs of operating and cooling servers. Besides, increasing energy consumption has a significant impact on the environment due to emissions of carbon dioxide. Dynamic consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs) into the minimal number of Physical Machines (PMs) is considered as one of the magic solutions to manage power consumption. The virtual machine placement problem is a critical issue for good VM consolidation. This paper proposes a Power-Aware technique depending on Particle Swarm Optimization (PAPSO) to determine the near-optimal placement for the migrated VMs. A discrete version of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is adopted based on a decimal encoding to map the migrated VMs to the best appropriate PMs. Furthermore, an effective minimization fitness function is employed to reduce power consumption without violating the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Specifically, PAPSO consolidates the migrated VMs into the minimum number of PMs with a major constraint to decrease the number of overloaded hosts as much as possible. Therefore, the number of VM migrations can be reduced drastically by taking into consideration the main sources for VM migrations; overloaded hosts and underloaded ones. PAPSO is implemented in CloudSim and the experimental results on random workloads with different sizes of VMs and PMs show that PAPSO does not violate SLA and outperforms the Power-Aware Best Fit Decreasing algorithm (PABFD). It can reduce about 8.01%, 39.65%, 66.33%, and 11.87% on average in terms of consumed energy, number of VM migrations, number of host shutdowns and the combined metric Energy SLA Violation (ESV), respectively.

Adaptive Markov‐based approach for dynamic virtual machine consolidation in cloud data centers with quality‐of‐service constraints

SummaryDynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation is one of the emerging technologies that has been considered for low‐cost computing in cloud data centers. Quality‐of‐service (QoS) assurance is one of the challenging issues in the VM consolidation problem since it is directly affected by the increase of resource utilization due to the consolidations. In this paper, we take advantage of Markov chain models to propose a novel approach for VM consolidation that can be used to explicitly set a desired level of QoS constraint in a data center to ensure the QoS goals while improving system utilization. For this purpose, an energy‐efficient and QoS‐aware best fit decreasing algorithm for VM placement is proposed, which considers QoS objective when determining the location of a migrating VM. This algorithm employs an online transition matrix estimator method to deal with the nonstationary nature of real workload data. We also propose new policies for detecting overloaded and underloaded hosts. The performance of our proposed algorithms is evaluated through simulations. The results show that the proposed VM consolidation algorithms in this paper outperforms the benchmark algorithms in terms of energy consumption, service‐level agreement violations, and other cost factors.

Efficient virtual machine placement algorithms for consolidation in cloud data centers

Dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation is a successful approach to improve the energy efficiency and the resource utilization in cloud environments. Consequently, optimizing the online energy-performance tradeoff directly influences quality of service. In this study, algorithms named as CPU Priority based Best-Fit Decreasing (CPBFD) and Dynamic CPU Priority based Best-Fit Decreasing (DCPBFD) are proposed for VM placement. A number of VM placement algorithms are implemented and compared with the proposed algorithms. The algorithms are evaluated through simulations with real-world workload traces and it is shown that the proposed algorithms outperform the known algorithms. The simulation results clearly show that CPBFD and DCPBFD provide the least service level agreement violations, least VM migrations, and efficient energy consumption.

An Energy and SLA-Aware Resource Management Strategy in Cloud Data Centers

Reducing energy consumption of data centers is an important way for cloud providers to improve their investment yield, but they must also ensure that the services delivered meet the various requirements of consumers. In this paper, we propose a resource management strategy to reduce both energy consumption and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations in cloud data centers. It contains three improved methods for subproblems in dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation. For making hosts detection more effective and improving the VM selection results, first, the overloaded hosts detecting method sets a dynamic independent saturation threshold for each host, respectively, which takes the CPU utilization trend into consideration; second, the underutilized hosts detecting method uses multiple factors besides CPU utilization and the Naive Bayesian classifier to calculate the combined weights of hosts in prioritization step; and third, the VM selection method considers both current CPU usage and future growth space of CPU demand of VMs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy, it is simulated in CloudSim and compared with five existing energy–saving strategies using real-world workload traces. The experimental results show that our strategy outperforms others with minimum energy consumption and SLA violation.