Virtual Machine Placement Strategy Research Articles

Energy-aware virtual machine placement based on a holistic thermal model for cloud data centers

As energy-intensive infrastructures, data centers (DCs) have become a pressing challenge for managers due to their significant energy consumption and carbon emissions. Information technology (IT) and cooling systems contribute the most to energy consumption. Energy-aware virtual machine (VM) scheduling methods have been widely demonstrated to reduce energy consumption and operating costs in DCs. However, as realistic DCs exhibit complex power and thermodynamic behaviors, existing works cannot provide efficient measures to optimize computing and cooling power consumption simultaneously. To overcome this challenge, we construct a holistic thermal model (including CPU and server inlet thermal models) to accurately represent the non-uniform, dynamic thermal environment. Subsequently, this work proposes a thermal model-based energy-aware VM placement method (TEVP) to minimize the holistic energy consumption of the DCs, considering resource and thermal constraints. We develop a novel hybrid swarm intelligence algorithm (DE-ERPSO) combining differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization with an elite re-selection mechanism (ERPSO) to explore more energy-efficient VM placement schemes. Extensive experiments are conducted on an extended CloudSim to validate the performance of the proposed TEVP using real-world workload traces (PlanetLab and Azure). Results show that TEVP saves over 5.6% of the total energy consumption over the advanced baselines while maintaining low thermal violations.

Towards optimal virtual machine placement methods in cloud environments

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.

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.

An efficient fault tolerance scheme based enhanced firefly optimization for virtual machine placement in cloud computing

SummaryThe virtual machine placement for the highly reliable cloud application is considered as one of the challenging and critical issues. To tackle such an issue, this article proposes the enhanced firefly algorithm based virtual machine placement model. But the migration time of the virtual machine placement is high and to reduce the migration time of the virtual machine placement, this article utilizes the K‐means clustering algorithm. In addition, to obtain the optimal cluster for the virtual machine placement, the adaptive particle swarm optimization with the coyote optimization algorithm is employed. The experimental results are conducted for the proposed approach using various measures such as transmission overhead, total execution time, packet size, parallel applications numbers, and virtual machine numbers. The results demonstrate that the proposed method offers improved performance and an optimal virtual machine placement scheme with respect to the various constraint factors. The evaluation exposes that the proposed method offers less execution time when compared to other methods.

A sampling-based online Co-Location-Resistant Virtual Machine placement strategy

In this paper, we discuss the co-location attack problem in the cloud IaaS from the Virtual Machine (VM) placement strategy perspective. We formulate the online secure optimization VM placement problem in a way that guarantees—apriori—a specified level of security while minimizing the number of used physical servers. To solve such a problem, we propose an approximate online secure VM placement algorithm based on sampling. The polynomial-time algorithm is based on a sound security inference procedure based on the confidence interval estimation method. Our empirical results demonstrate the correctness and the effectiveness of our approach in guaranteeing a Co-Location-Resistant (CLR) VM placement with a specific level of confidence and a threshold error as new incoming VM requests are being assigned to servers online. We compared our algorithm to a CLR alternative presented in Azar et al. (2014).

Energy efficient VM placement and task scheduling techniques to achieve green cloud environment

Continuous increase in the demand for cloud services has resulted in increased workloads. Effective distribution of these augmented tasks on a limited infrastructure for providing the services is a challenging issue. This necessitates servers to run continuously raising the power usage in the data centres. High power consumption results in releasing major amount of CO2 gas to the atmosphere, polluting our natural environment. So, there is a need to think of green cloud computing to reduce this effect of harmful gas to our environment. Designing an energy efficient data centre is a perennial challenge. Hence in this paper, optimal virtual machine placement strategy using knapsack dynamic programming technique and an efficient precedence-based task distribution approach are proposed to alleviate the power consumption and achieve the quality of service maintaining the service level agreements. The implementation results obtained have proved its power efficiency with better quality of service.

A network-aware and power-efficient virtual machine placement scheme in cloud datacenters based on chemical reaction optimization

In the present article, we propose a virtual machine placement (VMP) algorithm for reducing power consumption in heterogeneous cloud data centers. We propose a novel model for the estimation of power consumption of datacenter’s network. The proposed model is employed to estimate power consumption of a Fat-Tree network. It calculates the traffic of each network layer and uses the results to estimate the average power consumption of each switch in the network, which is used for network power calculation. Further, we employ the chemical reaction optimization (CRO) algorithm as a meta-heuristic algorithm to obtain a power-efficient mapping of virtual machines (VMs) to physical machines (PMs). Moreover, two kinds of solution encoding schemes, namely permutation-based and grouping-based encoding schemes, were utilized for representing individuals in CRO. For each encoding scheme, we designed proper operators required by the CRO for manipulating the molecules in search of more optimal solution candidates. Additionally, we modeled VMs with east–west and north–south communications, and PMs with constrained CPU, memory, and bandwidth capacity. Our network power model is integrated into the CRO algorithms to enable the estimation of both PMs and network power consumption. We compared our proposed methods with a number of similar methods. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed methods perform well and the CRO algorithm with the grouping-based encoding outperforms the rest of the methods in terms of power consumption. The evaluation results also show the significance of network power consumption.

A global-energy-aware virtual machine placement strategy for cloud data centers

Virtual machine (VM) placement is a key technique for energy optimization in cloud data centers. Previous work generally focus on how to place the VMs efficiently in servers to optimize the physical resources used (e.g., memory, bandwidth, CPU, etc.), network resources used or cooling energy consumption. These work can optimize the energy consumption of cloud data centers according to one or two aspects (e.g. server, network or cooling), however, these methods may cause increased energy consumption in other aspects. To address this problem, we propose a global-energy-aware VMP (virtual machine placement) strategy to reduce, from multiple aspects, the total energy consumption of data centers. A two-step SAG algorithm is designed to lower the energy consumption of cloud data centers where multiple VMs are deployed. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of SAG. Two workloads from real-world data centers are utilized to quantitatively measure and compare the performance of our SAG with other typical algorithms. Experimental results indicate that, compared to other algorithms, our global-energy-aware VMP strategy can reduce the total energy consumption of the cloud data center by 8%–24.9%.

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.

A Virtual Machine Placement Strategy Based on Virtual Machine Selection and Integration

A Virtual Machine Placement Strategy Based on Virtual Machine Selection and Integration

A security-aware virtual machine placement in the cloud using hesitant fuzzy decision-making processes

The introduction of cloud computing systems brought with itself a solution for the dynamic scaling of computing resources leveraging various approaches for providing computing power, networking, and storage. On the other hand, it helped decrease the human resource cost by delegating the maintenance cost of infrastructures and platforms to the cloud providers. Nevertheless, the security risks of utilizing shared resources are recognized as one of the major concerns in using cloud computing environments. To be more specific, an intruder can attack a virtual machine and consequently extend his/her attack to other virtual machines that are co-located on the same physical machine. The worst situation is when the hypervisor is compromised in which all the virtual machines assigned to the physical node will be under security risk. To address these issues, we have proposed a security-aware virtual machine placement scheme to reduce the risk of co-location for vulnerable virtual machines. Four attributes are introduced to reduce the aforementioned risk including the vulnerability level of a virtual machine, the importance level of a virtual machine in the given context, the cumulative vulnerability level of a physical machine, and the capacity of a physical machine for the allocation of new virtual machines. Nevertheless, the evaluation of security risks, due to the various vulnerabilities’ nature as well as the different properties of deployment environments is not quite accurate. To manage the precision of security evaluations, it is vital to consider hesitancy factors regarding security evaluations. To consider hesitancy in the proposed method, hesitant fuzzy sets are used. In the proposed method, the priorities of the cloud provider for the allocation of virtual machines are also considered. This will allow the model to assign more weights to attributes that have higher importance for the cloud provider. Eventually, the simulation results for the devised scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the overall security risk of the given cloud data center. The results show that the proposed approach can reduce the risk of attacks caused by the co-location of virtual machines up to 41% compared to the existing approaches.

Network policy aware placement of tasks for elastic applications in IaaS-cloud environment

Using cloud computing as a base, new technologies like data analytics, Internet of Things, machine learning etc., have emerged. Applications that use these technologies, depend on cloud datacenters (DC) for their computing power. Performance of these applications depends on dynamic resource provisioning by DC, as there is unpredictability of rate at which data arrives for immediate processing. Cloud service providers implement this dynamism in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment, using elastic virtual machines (VM). Placing these VMs onto same physical machines (PM) and/or on the network neighborhood machines is believed to increase application performance as the network latency is minimal. Deploying sub-optimal VM placement schemes creates unwanted cross network traffic resulting in poor application performance and increases the DC operating cost. This paper formulates the policy and elastic aware placement (PEAP) as an optimization problem, with additional constraints such as fixed PM, balanced PM and co-location VMs. Further, we propose PEAP algorithm which considers individual requests demanding for one or more VMs as a whole for placement along with the life-time of requests. Proposed algorithm gives optimal VM placements for increased application performance and DC efficacy. CloudSimPlus based experiments demonstrate that as compared to first fit decreasing (FFD). First fit increasing (FFI) and first come first serve (FCFS) algorithms, the proposed technique leads to reduced resource fragmentation and resource migrations. PEAP achieves placement of all the elastic VMs together with reduced network cost, thereby increasing the application performance.

Quantify Co-Residency Risks in the Cloud Through Deep Learning

Cloud computing, while becoming more and more popular as a dominant computing platform, introduces new security challenges. When virtual machines are deployed in a cloud environment, virtual machine placement strategies can significantly affect the overall security risks of the entire cloud. In recent years, the attacks are specifically designed to co-locate with target virtual machines in the cloud. The virtual machine placement without considering the security risks may put the users, or even the entire cloud, in danger. In this article, we present a fine-grained model to quantify the risk level caused by co-residency. Using a large scale dataset collected from Microsoft Azure Platform, we profile the behavior patterns of normal service subscribers (tenants) using our proposed feature metrics. Tenants are clustered into multiple categories. After the baseline is established based on the normal behavior pattern, the derivation can be evaluated for each category and the high-risk group can be labeled accordingly. With the labeled datasets, a classification component and a quantification component are constructed to dynamically quantify the co-residency risks for a specific virtual machine. Our experimental results demonstrate the robustness of our model to the new data and the accuracy is verified by examination of F-score Matrix.

Virtual machine placement strategy using cluster-based genetic algorithm

The problem of virtual machine (VM) live migration in self-driving systems targets reallocating resources among VMs running different self-driving services for load balance. It is of great importance to enable a running VM to be moved to another physical machine (host) seamlessly. Due to the nature of self-driving applications, it is important to select an optimal set of hosts to place VMs within an interactive time. The VM placement problem can be formalized as a bin packing problem, which is proved to be NP-hard. To solve the problem, we develop a cluster-based genetic algorithm that outputs an approximation result of the bin pack problem. In particular, our proposed algorithm clusters the population of current generation and selects individuals from different groups with reduced crossover operations. The number of crossover operations is directly related to the algorithm efficiency. We use the run-time features to evaluate the preference of VMs on hardware resources, which is utilized to generate initial solutions and avoid overload. Experimental results show that our approach is able to outperform the tradition genetic algorithm regarding both accuracy and efficiency.

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.

Optimal virtual machine placement with multiple resources constraints in cloud data centers

In cloud data centers, different virtual machine placement strategies will affect the resource utilization efficiency of the whole system. How to improve the overall resource utilization of the system by adjusting the virtual machine placement strategy under limited resources is the focus of current researchers. In this paper, a new virtual machine placement strategy is proposed, which is based on the comprehensive constraints of various system resources. In the process of solving the problem, a multi-objective ant colony optimization algorithm is used. Simulation results show that this method can effectively reduce the number of physical machines activated in the data center, and the accuracy is high.

A Dynamic Virtual Machine Resource Consolidation Strategy Based on a Gray Model and Improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization

With the continuous expansion of the scale of cloud datacenters, high energy consumption has become a problem. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an effective method of energy management, but overly aggressive consolidation has caused issues such as high service level agreement violation (SLA) rates and excessive migrations. To reduce energy consumption while ensuring the quality of service of a datacenter, a VM dynamic consolidation strategy based on a gray model and an improved discrete particle swarm algorithm (GM-DPSO) is proposed. This strategy uses a gray prediction algorithm for load detection and adjusts the size of the threshold according to the load condition. Then, we select VMs for overloaded and underloaded hosts and complete the placement of VMs through a VM placement strategy based on an improved discrete particle swarm algorithm. This method aims to improve the load balance, establish a mapping between VMs and hosts, use particles to search for the best VM placement in the global scope, and reduce the probability of SLAV. Our algorithm considers the impact of VM migration on system energy consumption and service quality and takes sufficient measures to reduce the number of migrations. To verify the effectiveness and practicality of this strategy, experiments were conducted on actual workloads, and the results were compared with those of other strategies. The experimental results show that the GM-DPSO greatly improves service quality while reducing energy consumption and SLAV by 34.53% and 97.53%, respectively. The methods and theories in this paper provide strong theoretical and practical engineering guidance for large-scale cloud deployment.

Bio-inspired virtual machine placement schemes in cloud computing environment: taxonomy, review, and future research directions

Energy efficiency is one of the important issues in green cloud data centers (DCs). In this context, a virtual machine (VM) placement is one of the important techniques which can be used to achieve energy efficiency in such environments. Bio-inspired optimization algorithms are widely used in the literature to solve the VM placement (VMP) problem and different types of them are benefited to achieve energy efficiency while meeting Quality of Service (QoS) and user-specified constraints such as deadlines and cost. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of the bio-inspired VMP schemes. For this purpose, we first provide the essential concepts regarding the VMP and describe various objectives and factors which can be considered in this process. Then, we provide a taxonomy of VMP schemes regarding their applied optimization algorithms and compare their employed factors in the VMP process as well as simulator environments and the metrics which have been utilized in the verification of the investigated VMP frameworks. Finally, the concluding remarks and future researches directions are provided.

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.

Comparative study between exact and metaheuristic approaches for virtual machine placement process as knapsack problem

In cloud computing, the virtual machine placement is a critical process which aims to identify the most appropriate physical machine to host the virtual machine. It has a significant impact on the performance, resource usage and energy consumption of the datacenters. In order to reduce the number of active physical machines in a datacenter, several virtual machine placement schemes have already been designed and proposed. This study investigates how do four different methods compare to each other in terms of accuracy and efficiency for solving the virtual machine placement as a knapsack problem. A new approach has been adopted which focuses on maximizing the use of a server’s central processing unit resource considering a certain capacity threshold. The compared methods are classified; two belong to the category of the exact methods, i.e., branch and bound and dynamic programming, while the other two represent the approximate approach, i.e., genetic algorithm and ant colony optimization algorithm. Experimental results show that the metaheuristic ant colony optimization algorithm outperforms the other three algorithms in terms of efficiency.