A Virtual Machine Placement Algorithm with Energy-Efficiency in Cloud Computing

Energy efficient virtual machines (VM) management and distribution on cloud platforms is an important research subject. Mapping VMs into PMs (Physical Machines) requires knowing the capacity of each PM and the resource requirements of the VMs. It should also take into accounts of VM operation overheads, the reliability of PMs, Quality of Service (QoS) in addition to energy efficiency. In this article, the authors propose an energy efficient statistical live VM placement scheme in a heterogeneous server cluster. Their scheme supports VM requests scheduling and live migration to minimize the number of active servers in order to save the overall energy in a virtualized server cluster. Specifically, the proposed VM placement scheme incorporates all VM operation overheads in the dynamic migration process. In addition, it considers other important factors in relation to energy consumption and is ready to be extended with more considerations on user demands. The authors conducted extensive evaluations based on HPC jobs in a simulated environment. The results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.