Number Of Active Physical Machines Research Articles

VM performance-aware virtual machine migration method based on ant colony optimization in cloud environment

Many virtual machine (VM) allocation methods have been proposed to reduce the number of physical machines (PMs), improve resource utilization for cloud service providers. If VMs are migrated on the same PM, then there will be substantial resource competition among these VMs, which results in VM performance reduction. Many VM migration (VMM) methods neglect VM performance reduction. Although some performance-aware VM allocation methods were proposed, the performance optimization objective of these methods mainly aimed at guaranteeing service level agreement or reducing VM downtime during migration, and they did not scientifically analyze how the VM performance degrades. Therefore, how to minimize the VM performance reduction for users when migrating VMs remains a major challenge. This paper proposes a VM Performance-Aware VMM method (PAVMM) for both users and cloud service providers. To maximize VM performance for users, it utilizes the VM performance model, which was built in our previous works, to predict the VM performance after migrating VMs. It then establishes an optimization objective of maximizing VM performance for users. Meanwhile, minimizing the number of active PMs and the total migration cost are regarded as additional optimization objectives for cloud service providers. Therefore, we formulate VMM as a multi-objective optimization problem, which tries to maximize VM performance for users and minimize the number of active PMs and the total migration cost for cloud service providers simultaneously. Then an ant colony optimization (ACO)-based algorithm is proposed to solve the NP-hard VMM problem. Lastly, the experiments are conducted to evaluate PAVMM, and the results verify its efficiency.

Loads prediction and consolidation of virtual machines in cloud

SummaryVirtual machine (VM) consolidation is to assign a set of VMs requested by operators to the physical machines (PMs) in the data centers so that certain cost, profit or performance objective is optimized, subject to the PMs resource capacity constraints. It is an important mean to decrease the total power consumption by reducing the number of active physical machines (PM) in a cloud. In this context, most of the existing solutions rely on highly frequent live migration to reduce the number of active physical machines. However, live migration is a high resource consumption and time‐consuming operation, thus, frequent use of live migration not only increases energy consumption but also affects the stability of the physical machine, which in turn affects the services on the virtual machine. Reducing the number of active physical machines while reducing the number of live migrations is a major challenge in the face of massive fluctuating virtual machine loads. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, we present a VM consolidation algorithm for predictable loads (VCPL) to reduce the live migration operations. First, we present a cyclic usage prediction (CUP) method to predict the load in a whole cycle (a day) of a VM. Then, we separate the VMs with stable and cyclic load out from others and consolidate them to PMs by using VCPL to make sure each PM has a stable load. Thus, energy can be reduced by avoiding most of live migration operations, and the stability of the data center can be observably improved. We evaluate our solution through simulations on real‐world workloads, the results show that, 66% of long‐term VMs have stable and cyclic loads and are predictable, by using VCPL, the live migration operations occurring on the PMs which accommodate those VMs can be reduced significantly than other solutions.

GMPR: A Two-Phase Heuristic Algorithm for Virtual Machine Placement in Large-Scale Cloud Data Centers

In the cloud data centers, due to the variable resource requirements of cloud tenants, designers applied the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model to provide services for tenants with allocating in charging. The application of virtualization technology enables multiple virtual machines (VMs) to share the resources of a physical machine (PM). Meanwhile, the efficiency of the data centers greatly depends on the working efficiency of VMs. Virtual machine placement (VMP) plays a vital role in minimizing total energy consumption and resource wastage for cloud data centers (CDCs). In this article, we propose a greedy algorithm minimizing power consumption and resource wastage (GMPR) for the VMP scheme to address the abovementioned issues. GMPR prioritizes the power-efficiency of PM to reduce the number of active PMs and to minimize total energy consumption. In addition, reducing total resource wastage involves first minimizing the resource of balance and resource wastage for a novel PM hosts VM and second minimizing resource wastage for PM placed VM. Extensive simulation results are conducted on synthetic and instances of Amazon EC2 with performance metrics confirm that GMPR has superiority in reducing energy consumption and resource wastage by an average of 1.91% and 16.18% compared with a cutting-edge method.

Server Consolidation Algorithms for Cloud Computing

In recent years, companies and researchers have hosted and rented computer resources over ‎the ‎‎internet due to cloud computing, which led to an increase in the energy consumed by ‎data centers. This ‎‎consumption is considered one of the world's highest, ‎which pushed many ‎researchers to propose ‎several techniques such as server ‎consolidation (SC) to solve the‎‏ ‏trade‏-‏off‏ ‏‏‎between energy saving and ‎quality of service ‎‎(QoS). SC requires maintaining service level ‎agreements (SLA) violations and ‎minimizing ‎the number of active physical machines (PMs). ‎Furthermore, to achieve this balance and ‎‎avoid ‎increasing hardware costs, the SC challenge targets ‎placing new virtual machines ‎‎(VMs) in ‎suitable PMs. This work explored the existing SC algorithms ‎that include ‎CloudSim as a simulator ‎environment and PlanetLab as a dataset. The authors compared ‎the well-known optimization methods ‎and extracted the weaknesses of the main three deployed ‎‎approaches involved in the consolidation ‎process: bin-packing model, metaheuristics, ‎and machine ‎learning-based solutions.‎

An Intelligent Traffic Entropy Learning-Based Load Management Model for Cloud Networks

This letter proposes a novel traffic entropy learning based load prediction and management model that envisages improvement of load distribution by minimization of performance degradation due to traffic prediction errors. The entropy determines the variance considering dynamic surge and plunge of the traffic periodically and suggests to acquire sufficient number of active physical machines (PMs) to render efficacious services. The experimental simulation and comparison of the proposed model with existing approaches reveal that it significantly improves resource utilization up to 21.5% with reduction of active servers and energy consumption up to 26.5% and 11.7%, respectively.

An Overview of the State-of-the-art Virtual Machine Placement Algorithms for Green Cloud Data Centres

Increased energy consumption in Cloud Data Centres (CDCs) increases the carbon footprint. Efficiency of the data centres thus needs to be improved through server consolidation using effective virtual machine (VM) placement and migration techniques and minimizing the number of active physical machines (PMs). One of the problems is how to operationally allocate the VMs to PMs. These allocations have both operational costs and energy consumption issues. To achieve the aim of ‘Green Computing’ a number of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms have been proposed for the VM placement. The authors of this paper have provided a detailed discussion and comparison of some of the current research works on energy efficiency. and cons of each of these techniques have been discussed. Some future research prospects in this field have also been mentioned at the end.

SLA-Aware and Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement and Consolidation in Heterogeneous DVFS Enabled Cloud Datacenter

Increasing demand for computational resource as services over the internet has led to the expansion of datacenter infrastructures. Thus, datacenter authorities are striving to adopt optimal power usage schemes to minimize costs, emissions and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations in their task scheduling for heterogeneous computation centers. One of the most effective strategies to reduce datacenter energy consumption is to maximize the utilization of physical machines and shut down the idle ones. This can be realized through two main algorithms, namely virtual machine placement and virtual machine consolidation. The VM placement method is a dynamic process to put these virtual devices on physical machines. The consolidation technique, however, tries to improve physical machine efficiency through grouping and live migration of dispersed virtual machines on lower number of active physical machine. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for improving the physical machine efficiency. The approach employs heuristics and meta-heuristic algorithms with eight performance criteria and is implemented on small to medium scale data centers using simulated cloud module. The results indicates that the proposed method showed up to 10.3%, 5.3%, and 12.5% the more significant efficiency rather best previous algorithms, respectively, in terms of the energy consumption, number of SLA violation and number of VMs migration.

AFED-EF: An Energy-Efficient VM Allocation Algorithm for IoT Applications in a Cloud Data Center

Cloud Data Centers (CDCs) have become a vital computing infrastructure for enterprises. However, CDCs consume substantial energy due to the increased demand for computing power, especially for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Although a great deal of research in green resource allocation algorithms have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of the CDCs, existing approaches mostly focus on minimizing the number of active Physical Machines (PMs) and rarely address the issue of load fluctuation and energy efficiency of the Virtual Machine (VM) provisions jointly. Moreover, existing approaches lack mechanisms to consider and redirect the incoming traffics to appropriate resources to optimize the Quality of Services (QoSs) provided by the CDCs. We propose a novel adaptive energy-aware VM allocation and deployment mechanism called AFED-EF for IoT applications to handle these problems. The proposed algorithm can efficiently handle the fluctuation of load and has good performance during the VM allocation and placement. We carried out extensive experimental analysis using a real-world workload based on more than a thousand PlanetLab VMs. The experimental results illustrate that AFED-EF outperforms other energy-aware algorithms in energy consumption, Service Level Agreements (SLA) violation, and energy efficiency.

Multi-objective optimization for VM placement in homogeneous and heterogeneous cloud service provider data centers

We address the virtual machine placement problem that arises in Cloud Service Providers data centers. We purpose, a Multi-Objective Integer Linear Programming model which aims at optimizing simultaneously the number of hosted virtual machines, the resource wastage and the number of active physical machines (PM) in order to minimize power consumption. This new combination of objectives enables to maximize the client satisfaction rate with minimizing the data center (DC) operational costs. We modelize this problem with a multi-objective integer linear program and solve it through two different methods. The first method computes a unique solution for a given preference order over the objectives whereas the second computes a set of non-dominated solutions. Both methods are compared through extensive simulation scenarios. We consider two DC architectures: homogeneous DCs (i.e., a DC with PMs having the same amount of resources) and heterogeneous DCs. We study the impact of each DC configuration on the performances of the solutions. We show that the second method leads to solutions with a reduction of up to 30% over the number of used PMs and that the heterogeneous DCs outperforms the homogeneous one across all objectives.

A multi-objective Monarch Butterfly Algorithm for virtual machine placement in cloud computing

The growing demand for cloud computing adoption presents more challenges for researchers to make cloud computing more efficient and affordable for infrastructure providers and end users. The management of cloud computing involves investing in IT infrastructure in the first phase and investing in energy, maintenance and space costs in the second phase. However, energy costs account for a large portion of cloud management costs, and saving energy consumption can significantly reduce overall cloud management costs. Server consolidation is a strategy to improve data center energy efficiency and resource utilization. Virtual machine (VM) placement is considered one of the main problems with VM consolidation. The VM placement problem aims to reduce the number of active physical machines in data center to reduce data center power consumption and maintenance costs. However, the waste of data center resources has a significant impact on the energy efficiency of the data center, so it should be considered in the VM placement strategy. This paper proposes a new method based on the Monarch Butterfly Optimization algorithm (MBO) called MBO-VM for new virtual machine placement, designed to maximize packaging efficiency and reduce the number of active physical servers. CloudSim toolkit is used to test the efficiency of the proposed MBO-VM approach under real cloud workloads as well as synthetic workloads. Simulation results show that MBO-VM produces significantly better results compared with known VM placement techniques. The proposed MBO-VM can reduce the number of active servers more effectively and maximize the packaging efficiency.

Placement for Intercommunicating Virtual Machines in Autoscaling Cloud Infrastructure

Due to pay-as-you-go style adopted by cloud datacenters (DC), modern day applications having intercommunicating tasks depend on DC for their computing power. Due to unpredictability of rate at which data arrives for immediate processing, application performance depends on autoscaling service of DC. Normal VM placement schemes place these tasks arbitrarily onto different physical machines (PM) leading to unwanted network traffic resulting in poor application performance and increases the DC operating cost. This paper formulates autoscaling and intercommunication aware task placements (AIATP) as an optimization problem, with additional constraints and proposes solution, which uses the placement knowledge of prior tasks of individual applications. When compared with well-known algorithms, CloudsimPlus-based simulation demonstrates that AIATP reduces the resource fragmentation (30%) and increases the resource utilization (18%) leading to minimal number of active PMs. AIATP places 90% tasks of an application together and thus reduces the number of VM migration (39%) while balancing the PMs.

A discrete chaotic multi-objective SCA-ALO optimization algorithm for an optimal virtual machine placement in cloud data center

Cloud computing, with its immense potentials in low cost and on-demand services, is a promising computing platform for both commercial and non-commercial computation applications. It focuses on the sharing of information and computation in a large network that are quite likely to be owned by geographically disbursed different venders. Power efficiency in cloud data centers (DCs) has become an important topic in recent years as more and larger DCs have been established and the electricity cost has become a major expense for operating them. Server consolidation using virtualization technology has become an important technology to improve the energy efficiency of DCs. Virtual machine (VM) assignment is the key in server consolidation. In the past few years, many methods to VM assignment have been proposed, but existing VM assignment approaches to the VM assignment problem consider the energy consumption by physical machines (PM). In current paper a new approach is proposed that using a combination of the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) and ant lion optimizer (ALO) as discrete multi-objective and chaotic functions for optimal VM assignment. First objective of our proposed model is minimizing the power consumption in cloud DCs by balancing the number of active PMs. Second objective is reducing the resources wastage by using optimal VM assignment on PMs in cloud DCs. Reducing SLA levels was another purpose of this research. By using the method, the number of increase of migration of VMs to PMs is prevented. In this paper, several performance metrics such as resource wastage, power consumption, overall memory utilization, overall CPU utilization, overall storage space, and overall bandwidth, a number of active PMs, a number of shutdowns, a number of migrations, and SLA are used. Ultimately, the results obtained from the proposed algorithm were compared with those of the algorithms used in this regard, including First Fit (FF), VMPACS and MGGA.

Power efficient virtual machine placement in cloud data centers with a discrete and chaotic hybrid optimization algorithm

Cloud computing is a new computation technology that provides services to consumers and businesses. The main idea of Cloud computing is to present software and hardware services through the Internet to the users and organizations at all levels. In Cloud computing, the users pay for the services, which means a usage-based payment system is used in this technology. Using virtualization technology in computation resources enables the appropriate utilization of resources in cloud computing. One of the most significant challenging issues in virtualization technology is the placement of optimal virtual machines on physical machines in cloud data centers. The placement of virtual machines comprises a process wherein virtual machines are mapped onto physical machines in cloud data centers. Optimal deployment leads to the reduction in power consumption, optimal use of resources, traffic reduction in data centers, costs reduction, and efficiency enhancement of the data center in the cloud. The present article proposed a new approach using a combination of the Sine–Cosine Algorithm and Salp Swarm Algorithm as discrete multi-objective and chaotic functions for optimal virtual machine placement. The first goal of the proposed algorithm was to reduce the power consumption in cloud data centers by condensing the number of active physical machines. The second goal was to reduce the waste of resources and manage it by optimally virtual machine placement on physical machines in cloud data centers. The third objective was to minimize and reduce Service Level Agreement among the active physical machines in cloud data centers. The proposed method prevent the increase in the migration of virtual machines onto physical machines. Ultimately, the results obtained from the proposed algorithm were compared with those of previous akin algorithms in the literature, including First Fit, Virtual Machine Placement Ant Colony System, and Modified Best Fit Decreasing. The proposed scheme is tested using Amazon EC2 Instances and the result indicated that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms for various performance metrics.

Virtual Machine Consolidation in Cloud Computing Systems: Challenges and Future Trends

Cloud Computing Systems (CCSs) provides a computing capability through the Internet. It enables organizations or individuals to have a computing power without deploying and maintaining their own Information Technology infrastructure. As a cloud is realized on a vast scale cloud, it consumes an enormous amount of energy. Migration pattern, where several Virtual Machines (VMs) can be placed on a minimum number of active Physical Machines is called VMs Consolidation (VMC). Thus, this technique can be a practical approach for balancing electricity consumption and other QoS requirement in CCSs. Especially, VMC must meet the service quality requirements, minimization of both energy consumption and Service Level Agreement violation in CCSs. This paper presents a systematic survey of VMC in CCSs with particular attention to the VMC phases, metrics, objectives, migration patterns, optimization methods, and evaluation approaches of VMC. Our review study is presented based on the past literature with a focus on the type of hardware metrics, software metrics, objectives, algorithms, and architectures of VMC in CCSs.

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.

Online traffic-aware linked VM placement in cloud data centers

In cloud computing, virtual machine (VM) placement plays a crucial role in data center (DC) management, as different ways of VM placement may require different system resources.As Cisco research reveals that virtualization of DC increases traffic within the DC and causes network bandwidth to become scarce resource, recent researches have been focusing on traffic-aware VM placement. However, previous traffic-aware VM placement schemes treat the VM placement as a static process in that they do not take into account the impact of the current placement decision on the subsequent placement. In this paper, we thus propose a novel online traffic-aware VM placement scheme. Our scheme views VM placement as a context-sensitive dynamic process in that the decision of every step of the placement is made aiming at helping the subsequent steps of placement to reduce the required network bandwidth in the long run. In our scheme, we consider not only inter-VM traffic but also the bandwidth constraint of a physical machine (PM) when making a VM placement decision. To realize our objective, we put those VMs with close end time in the same or close proximity PMs so that when the VMs are terminated, one can make enough room for the future arrivals so as to not only minimize the number of active PMs but also reduce networking costs. We conduct extensive simulations to verify the superiority of our scheme in terms of networking costs and energy consumption.Simulation results show that our scheme outperforms improved-best-fit-decreasing (IBFD) scheme, a revised best-fit version thattakes inter-VM traffic into account, by 30%–40% on network cost under various scenarios. Our scheme also promises 10%–25% power savingscompared with IBFD.

An energy-efficient algorithm for virtual machine placement optimization in cloud data centers

Cloud providers offer computing services based on user demands using the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service model. In a cloud data center, it is possible that multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) run on a Physical Machine (PM) using virtualization technology. Virtual Machine Placement (VMP) problem is the mapping of virtual machines across multiple physical ones. This process plays a vital role in defining energy consumption and resource usage efficiency in the cloud data center infrastructure. However, providing an efficient solution is not trivial due to difficulties such as machine heterogeneity, multi-dimensional resources, and large scale cloud data centers. In this paper, we propose an efficient heuristic algorithm that focuses on power consumption and resource wastage optimization to solve the aforementioned problem. The proposed algorithm, called MinPR, minimizes the total power consumption by reducing the number of active physical machines and prioritizing the power-efficient ones. Also, it reduces resource wastage by maximizing and balancing resource utilization among physical machines. To achieve these goals, we propose a new Resource Usage Factor model that manages virtual machine placement on physical machines using reward and penalty mechanisms. Simulations based on cloud user-customized VMs and Amazon EC2 Instances workloads illustrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches. In particular, the proposed algorithm reduces total energy consumption by up to 15% for cloud user-customized VMs and by up to 10% for Amazon EC2 Instances.

Utilization-aware energy-efficient virtual machine placement in cloud networks using NSGA-III meta-heuristic approach

One of the most important issues in the context of cloud computing concerns the placement of virtual machines (VMs). The purpose of multi-objective virtual machine placement (MO-VMP) is to find the best place of VMs on physical machines (PMs) so as to reach predetermined goals. In this regard, a fundamental goal is maximizing the utilization of available resources while minimizing energy consumption. It is clear that inefficient use of computing resources (for instance CPU, memory, storage capacity, and bandwidth) could cause increased energy wastage. On the other hand, with optimal placement of VMs on PMs, one may prevent migrating them from one PM to another in the future, itself a secondary cause of increased energy consumption. Concerning the MO-VMP, there are very serious challenges in previous studies. Some of these works have attempted to minimize the number of active PMs. Others have investigated minimizing rack link traffic and optimizing communication and VM migration costs regarding routing goals. Since the MO-VMP is an NP-hard problem and involves high spatial and temporal complexities, heuristic and meta-heuristic methods have been widely used to solve the problem in the past decade. In the present research, we use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-III) to determine the optimal MO-VMP. To this end, a multi-objective optimizing problem is designed, and after introducing a non-linear convex optimization solution, we solve it with the NSGA-III method. Our main purpose is to minimize overall resource loss while minimizing power consumption as well as decreasing the number of active PMs. The simulation results on the CloudSim simulator confirm the superiority of the proposed method over basic methods such as first-fit decreasing (FFD) and exact mathematical approaches in terms of significant criteria such as execution time, utilization, resource wastage, and energy consumption.

A Review on Virtual Machine Positioning and Consolidation Strategies for Energy Efficiency in Cloud Data Centers

The cloud data center consumes massively more and more energy which is considered inacceptable. Therefore further efforts are needed to improve the energy efficiency of such data centers by using Server Consolidation to minimize the number of Active Physical Machines (APMs) in a data center setting. Strategies for positioning and transformation of VM maintain their usefulness as a roadmap to maximum consolidation. The latest techniques do complex restructuring, thus optimizing VM's positioning. The paper provides a detailed state-of - the-art strategies for VM positioning and consolidation that help improve energy efficiency in cloud data centers. A comparison is provided here between the strategies that revealed the worthiness, limitations and suggestions of strengthening other methods along the way.

Prediction-based Resource Provision and Virtual Machines Placement in Cloud Data Center

With the rapid development of virtualization, cloud servers provide the power and flexibility that single servers struggle to provide. However, low utilization of physical machines and high energy consumption are the main concerns for cloud service providers. In this paper, we propose a predict-and-place framework to decrease the number of active physical machines in cloud centers. We analyze the historical VM (virtual machine) request records to predict the VM demands in the next several days and then use an offline VM placement strategy to keep the number of active servers as less as possible while satisfying the SLA (Service-Level Agreement) requirements. In the prediction process, we enhanced the classical Holt’s linear prediction method on account of inevitable outliers to increase the prediction accuracy. We conduct experiments to compare the prediction accuracy of Perceptron, classical Holt-Winters, and our refined, robust Holt-Winters method. The experiment based on real data shows the simple perceptron has an inferior result. Our improved prediction method reduces the MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) by about 50% compared with the classical one, and the predict-and-place framework decreases the average number of active physical machines effectively in the cloud data center.