Efficient Allocation Algorithm for Virtual Machines in Cloud Computing Systems

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the assignment problem of virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud computing system where users continuously request for VMs to run their applications. A requested VM must be hosted on a physical machine (PM) which has limited resource amounts for four kinds of resources, i.e., CPU, disk, memory, and network bandwidth. A VM can be terminated and then resumed later. Besides, each PM also has limited capacity for each kind of resource. We propose an efficient VM assignment algorithm, the Resource-based First-Fit Algorithm (RFFA), to assign VMs to PMs. The mechanism potentially assigns a VM to one of PMs with smaller identifies. Therefore, the PMs with larger identifies could be shut down and then the number of running PMs can be minimized. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms. The experimental results show that the RFFA scheme could use fewer running PMs than the Best-Fit and Worst-Fit algorithms and can achieve better energy savings.