EEVMC: An Energy Efficient Virtual Machine Consolidation Approach for Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

The dynamic landscape of cloud computing design presents significant challenges regarding power consumption and quality of service (QoS). Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is essential for reducing power usage and enhancing QoS by relocating VMs between hosts. OpenStack Neat, a leading framework for VM consolidation, employs the Modified Best-Fit Decreasing (MBFD) VM placement technique, which faces issues related to energy consumption and QoS. To address these issues, we propose an Energy Efficient VM Consolidation (EEVMC) approach. Our method introduces a novel host selection criterion based on the incurred loss during VM placement to identify the most efficient host. For validation, we conducted simulations using real-time workload traces from Planet-Lab and Materna over ten days, leveraging the latest CloudSim toolkit to compare our approach with state-of-the-art techniques. For Planet-Lab’s workload, our EEVMC approach shows a reduction in energy consumption by 80.35%, 59.76%, 21.59%, and 7.40%, and fewer system-level agreement (SLA) violations by 94.51%, 94.85%, 47.17%, and 17.78% when compared to Modified Best-Fit Decreasing (MBFD), Power-Aware Best Fit Decreasing (PABFD), Medium Fit Power Efficient Decreasing (MFPED), and Power-Efficient Best-Fit Decreasing (PEBFD), respectively. Similarly, for Materna, EEVMC achieves a reduction in energy consumption by 16.10%, 61.0%, 4.94%, and 4.82%, and fewer SLA violations by 76.99%, 88.88%, 12.50%, and 48.65% against the same benchmarks. Additionally, Loss-Aware Performance Efficient Decreasing (LAPED) significantly reduces the total number of VM migrations and SLA time per active host, indicating a substantial improvement in cloud computing efficiency.