Multiobjective virtual machine placement mechanisms using nature‐inspired metaheuristic algorithms in cloud environments: A comprehensive review

Cloud computing introduced a new paradigm in IT industry by providing on‐demand, elastic, ubiquitous computing resources for users. In a virtualized cloud data center, there are a large number of physical machines (PMs) hosting different types of virtual machines (VMs). Unfortunately, the cloud data centers do not fully utilize their computing resources and cause a considerable amount of energy waste that has a great operational cost and dramatic impact on the environment. Server consolidation is one of the techniques that provide efficient use of physical resources by reducing the number of active servers. Since VM placement plays an important role in server consolidation, one of the main challenges in cloud data centers is an efficient mapping of VMs to PMs. Multiobjective VM placement is generating considerable interest among researchers and academia. This paper aims to represent a detailed review of the recent state‐of‐the‐art multiobjective VM placement mechanisms using nature‐inspired metaheuristic algorithms in cloud environments. Also, it gives special attention to the parameters and approaches used for placing VMs into PMs. In the end, we will discuss and explore further works that can be done in this area of research.     

Burst‐aware virtual machine migration for improving performance in the cloud

Burst is a common pattern in the user's requirements, which suddenly increases the workload of virtual machines (VMs) and reduces the performance and energy efficiency of cloud computing systems (CCS). Virtualization technology with the ability to migrate VMs attempts to solve this problem. By migration, VMs can be dynamically consolidated to the users' requests. Burst temporarily increases the workload. Ignoring this issue will lead to incorrect decisions regarding the migration of VMs. It increases the number of migrations and Service Level Agreement Violations (SLAVs) due to overload. This may cause waste of resources, increase in energy consumption, and misplaced VMs. Therefore, a burst‐aware method for these issues is proposed in this paper. The method consists of two algorithms: one for determining the migration time and the other for the placement of VMs. We use the PlanetLab real dataset and CloudSim simulator to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results confirm the advantages of the method regarding performance compared to benchmark methods.     

Multicriteria decision‐making techniques for avoiding similar task scheduling conflict in cloud computing

An efficient task scheduling approach shows promising way to achieve better resource utilization in cloud computing. Various task scheduling approaches with optimization and decision‐making techniques have been discussed up to now. These approaches ignored scheduling conflict among the similar tasks. The conflict often leads to miss the deadlines of the tasks. The work studies the implementation of the MCDM (multicriteria decision‐making) techniques in backfilling algorithm to execute deadline‐based tasks in cloud computing. In general, the tasks are selected as backfill tasks, whose role is to provide ideal resources to other tasks in the backfilling approach. The selection of the backfill task is challenging one, when there are similar tasks. It creates conflict in the scheduling. In cloud computing, the deadline‐based tasks have multiple parameters such as arrival time, number of VMs (virtual machines), start time, duration of execution, and deadline. In this work, we present the deadline‐based task scheduling algorithm as an MCDM problem and discuss the MCDM techniques: AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process), VIKOR (VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje), and TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) to avoid similar task scheduling conflicts. We simulate the backfilling algorithm along with three MCDM mechanisms to avoid scheduling conflicts among the similar tasks. The synthetic workloads are considered to study the performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm. The mechanism suggests an efficient VM allocation and its utilization for deadline‐based tasks in the cloud environment.     

Dynamic Resource Allocation and Scheduling for Cloud‐Based Virtual Content Delivery Networks

This paper proposes a novel framework for virtual content delivery networks (CDNs) based on cloud computing. The proposed framework aims to provide multimedia content delivery services customized for content providers by sharing virtual machines (VMs) in the Infrastructure‐as‐a‐Service cloud, while fulfilling the service level agreement. Furthermore, it supports elastic virtual CDN services, which enables the capabilities of VMs to be scaled to encompass the dynamically changing resource demand of the aggregated virtual CDN services. For this, we provide the system architecture and relevant operations for the virtual CDNs and evaluate the performance based on a simulation.     

Power‐conservative server consolidation based resource management in cloud

The cloud computing environment is a real‐time communication network that involves a large number of systems connected in a distributed fashion, for which resources are available on demand. In recent years, due to the enormous growth of data and information, data maintenance tasks involve a major effort in information technology (IT) industries. So, IT industries are concentrating on the cloud computing environment in order to maintain their data and manage their resources. Owing to the increase in the number of data centres, which have an impact on electrical energy cost, peak power dissipation, cooling and carbon emission, power‐conservation‐based resource management is essential. A best‐fit heuristic job placement algorithm is proposed in this paper in order to increase the job allocation percentage, a worst‐fit heuristic virtual machine (VM) placement algorithm is also proposed in order to place the VMs over the physical machines (PMs) thereby reducing the number of the latter allotted, and a server consolidation algorithm is proposed in order to improve power conservation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring performance degradation of virtual machines based on the Bayesian network with hidden variables

In the virtualized environment, multiple virtual machines (VMs) sharing the same physical host are vulnerable to resource competition, which may cause performance interference among VMs and thus lead to VM performance degradation. This paper focuses on measuring CPU, memory, I/O, and the overall VM performance degradation caused by the performance interference according to the properties in the runtime environment of VMs. To this end, we adopt Bayesian network (BN), as the framework for uncertainty representation and inference, and construct a VM property‐performance BN (VPBN) with hidden variables, which represent the unobserved performance degradation of CPU, memory, and I/O, respectively. Then, we present the method to measure performance degradation of VMs by probabilistic inferences with the VPBN. Experimental results show the accuracy and efficiency of our method.     

SecCloudSharing: Secure data sharing in public cloud using ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based proxy re‐encryption with revocation

An efficient cryptography mechanism should enforce an access control policy over the encrypted data to provide flexible, fine‐grained, and secure data access control for secure sharing of data in cloud storage. To make a secure cloud data sharing solution, we propose a ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based proxy re‐encryption scheme. In the proposed scheme, we design an efficient fine‐grained revocation mechanism, which enables not only efficient attribute‐level revocation but also efficient policy‐level revocation to achieve backward secrecy and forward secrecy. Moreover, we use a multiauthority key attribute center in the key generation phase to overcome the single‐point performance bottleneck problem and the key escrow problem. By formal security analysis, we illustrate that our proposed scheme achieves confidentiality, secure key distribution, multiple collusions resistance, and policy‐ or attribute‐revocation security. By comprehensive performance and implementation analysis, we illustrate that our proposed scheme improves the practical efficiency of storage, computation cost, and communication cost compared to the other related schemes.     

A Modelling of Context-Aware Elderly Healthcare Eco-System-(CA-EHS) Using Signal Analysis and Machine Learning Approach

In cloud computing, more often times cloud assets are underutilized because of poor allocation of task in virtual machine (VM). There exist inconsistent factors affecting the scheduling tasks to VMs. In this paper, an effective scheduling with multi-objective VM selection in cloud data centers is proposed. The proposed multi-objective VM selection and optimized scheduling is described as follows. Initially the input tasks are gathered in a task queue and tasks computational time and trust parameters are measured in the task manager. Then the tasks are prioritized based on the computed measures. Finally, the tasks are scheduled to the VMs in host manager. Here, multi-objectives are considered for VM selection. The objectives such as power usage, load volume, and resource wastage are evaluated for the VMs and the entropy is calculated for the measured objectives and based on the entropy value krill herd optimization algorithm prioritized tasks are scheduled to the VMs. The experimental results prove that the proposed entropy based krill herd optimization scheduling outperforms the existing general krill herd optimization, cuckoo search optimization, cloud list scheduling, minimum completion cloud, cloud task partitioning scheduling and round robin techniques.

     

Correlation-based virtual machine migration in dynamic cloud environments

Virtual machine (VM) migration enables flexible and efficient resource management in modern data centers. Although various VM migration algorithms have been proposed to improve the utilization of physical resources in data centers, they generally focus on how to select VMs to be migrated only according to their resource requirements and ignore the relationship between the VMs and servers with respect to their varying resource usage as well as the time at which the VMs should be migrated. This may dramatically degrade the algorithm performance and increase the operating and the capital cost when the resource requirements of the VMs change dynamically over time. In this paper, we propose an integrated VM migration strategy to jointly consider and address these issues. First, we establish a service level agreement-based soft migration mechanism to significantly reduce the number of VM migrations. Then, we develop two algorithms to solve the VM and server selection issues, in which the correlation between the VMs and the servers is used to identify the appropriate VMs to be migrated and the destination servers for them. The experimental results obtained from extensive simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms compared to traditional schemes in terms of the rate of resource usage, the operating cost and the capital cost.     

An Approach Towards Amelioration of an Efficient VM Allocation Policy in Cloud Computing Domain

Cloud computing is on the horizon of the domain of information technology over the recent few years, giving different remotely accessible services to the cloud users. The quality-of-service (QoS) maintaining of a cloud service provider is the most dominating research issue today. The QoS embraces with different issues like virtual machine (VM) allocation, optimization of response time and throughput, utilizing processing capability, load balancing etc. VM allocation policy deals with the allocation of VMs to the hosts in different datacenters. This paper highlights a new VM allocation policy that distributes the load of VMs among hosts which improves the utilization of hosts’ processing capability as well as makespan and throughput of cloud system. The experimental results are obtained by utilizing trace based simulation in CloudSim 3.0.3 and compared with existing VM allocation policies.     

Resource allocation in cloud virtual machines based on empirical service traces

One of the key technologies in cloud computing is virtualization. Using virtualization, a system can optimize usage of resources, simplify management of infrastructure and software, and reduce hardware requirements. This research focuses on infrastructure as a service, resource allocation by providers for consumers, and explores the optimization of system utilization based on actual service traces of a real world cloud computing site. Before activating additional virtual machines (VM) for applications, the system examines CPU usage in the resource pools. The behavior of each VM can be estimated by monitoring the CPU usage for different types of services, and consequently, additional resources added or idle resources released. Based on historical observations of the required resources for each kind of service, the system can efficiently dispatch VMs. The proposed scheme can efficiently and effectively distribute resources to VMs for maximizing utilization of the cloud computing center. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A learning‐based approach for virtual machine placement in cloud data centers

In recent years, the increasing use of cloud services has led to the growth and importance of developing cloud data centers. One of the challenging issues in the cloud environments is high energy consumption in data centers, which has been ignored in the corporate competition for developing cloud data centers. The most important problems of using large cloud data centers are high energy costs and greenhouse gas emission. So, researchers are now struggling to find an effective approach to decreasing energy consumption in cloud data centers. One of the preferred techniques for reducing energy consumption is the virtual machines (VMs) placement. In this paper, we present a VM allocation algorithm to reduce energy consumption and Service Level Agreement Violation (SLAV). The proposed algorithm is based on best‐fit decreasing algorithm, which uses learning automata theory, correlation coefficient, and ensemble prediction algorithm to make better decisions in VM allocation. The experimental results indicated improvement regarding energy consumption and SLAV, compared with well‐familiar baseline VM allocation algorithms.     

基于哈希图的虚拟机实时迁移方法

跨广域网的虚拟机实时迁移是多数据中心云计算环境的重要技术支撑。当前跨广域网的虚拟机实时迁移受到带宽小和无共享存储的限制而面临着技术挑战，如镜像数据迁移的安全性和一致性问题。为此，该文提出基于哈希图(HashGraph)的跨数据中心虚拟机实时迁移方法，运用去中心化的思想，实现数据中心之间可靠和高效的镜像信息分布式共享。通过HashGraph中Merkle DAG存储结构，改善了重复数据删除在跨数据中心迁移虚拟机镜像时的缺陷。与现有方法相比，该文方法缩短了总迁移时间。     

Extended artificial immune system–based optimized access control for big data on a cloud environment

Integrating parallel computing and distributed computing together can be obtained by cloud computing (CC). One of the major problems faced by public CC is security regarding data access control. CC permits people to share data, documents, videos, and other types of data. Generally, the cloud data are considered as big data, because the volume of the data is huge and it has a greater number of varieties. In recent days, attribute‐based data sharing applied only for selected data is a crucial problem. One of the existing approaches encrypts data using various kinds of keys based on several types of cryptosystems. However, those kinds of methods have some weaknesses such as inability to handle the attributes effectively, storage of more unwanted copies of the same data, and policy changes. It needs a high amount of computational cost and reduces the efficiency of memory utilization and the computational speed. This paper motivated to design and implement an efficient approach for optimized access control (OAC) for data stored in the cloud to overcome these kinds of issues. The efficiency of the proposed method is proved through a simulation‐based experiment in Cloud Simulator.     

Security and trust preserving inter- and intra-cloud VM migrations

This paper focus on providing a secure and trustworthy solution for virtual machine (VM) migration within an existing cloud provider domain, and/or to the other federating cloud providers. The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud service model is mainly addressed to extend and complement the previous Trusted Computing techniques for secure VM launch and VM migration case. The VM migration solution proposed in this paper uses a Trust_Token based to guarantee that the user VMs can only be migrated and hosted on a trustworthy and/or compliant cloud platforms. The possibility to also check the compliance of the cloud platforms with the pre-defined baseline configurations makes our solution compatible with an existing widely accepted standards-based, security-focused cloud frameworks like FedRAMP. Our proposed solution can be used for both inter- and intra-cloud VM migrations. Different from previous schemes, our solution is not dependent on an active (on-line) trusted third party; that is, the trusted third party only performs the platform certification and is not involved in the actual VM migration process. We use the Tamarin solver to realize a formal security analysis of the proposed migration protocol and show that our protocol is safe under the Dolev-Yao intruder model. Finally, we show how our proposed mechanisms fulfill major security and trust requirements for secure VM migration in cloud environments.     

IaaS云中面向能源效率优化的虚拟机调度算法(英文)

In IaaS Cloud,different mapping relationships between virtual machines(VMs) and physical machines(PMs) cause different resource utilization,so how to place VMs on PMs to reduce energy consumption is becoming one of the major concerns for cloud providers.The existing VM scheduling schemes propose optimize PMs or network resources utilization,but few of them attempt to improve the energy efficiency of these two kinds of resources simultaneously.This paper proposes a VM scheduling scheme meeting multiple resource constraints,such as the physical server size(CPU,memory,storage,bandwidth,etc.) and network link capacity to reduce both the numbers of active PMs and network elements so as to finally reduce energy consumption.Since VM scheduling problem is abstracted as a combination of bin packing problem and quadratic assignment problem,which is also known as a classic combinatorial optimization and NP-hard problem.Accordingly,we design a twostage heuristic algorithm to solve the issue,and the simulations show that our solution outperforms the existing PM- or network-only optimization solutions.     

A Lion‐Whale optimization‐based migration of virtual machines for data centers in cloud computing

The scalability, reliability, and flexibility in the cloud computing services are the obligations in the growing demand of computation power. To sustain the scalability, a proper virtual machine migration (VMM) approach is needed with apt balance on quality of service and service‐level agreement violation. In this paper, a novel VMM algorithm based on Lion‐Whale optimization is developed by integrating the Lion optimization algorithm and the Whale optimization algorithm. The optimal virtual machine (VM) migration is performed by the Lion‐Whale VMM based on a new fitness function in the regulation of the resource use, migration cost, and energy consumption of VM placement. The experimentation of the proposed VM migration strategy is performed over 4 cloud setups with a different configuration which are simulated using CloudSim toolkit. The performance of the proposed method is validated over existing optimization‐based VMM algorithms, such as particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm, using the performance measures, such as energy consumption, migration cost, and resource use. Simulation results reveal the fact that the proposed Lion‐Whale VMM effectively outperforms other existing approaches in optimal VM placement for cloud computing environment with reduced migration cost of 0.01, maximal resource use of 0.36, and minimal energy consumption of 0.09.     

Symbiotic Dynamic Memory Balancing for Virtual Machines in Smart TV Systems

Smart TV is expected to bring cloud services based on virtualization technologies to the home environment with hardware and software support. Although most physical resources can be shared among virtual machines (VMs) using a time sharing approach, allocating the proper amount of memory to VMs is still challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism to dynamically balance the memory allocation among VMs in virtualized Smart TV systems. In contrast to previous studies, where a virtual machine monitor (VMM) is solely responsible for estimating the working set size, our mechanism is symbiotic. Each VM periodically reports its memory usage pattern to the VMM. The VMM then predicts the future memory demand of each VM and rebalances the memory allocation among the VMs when necessary. Experimental results show that our mechanism improves performance by up to 18.28 times and reduces expensive memory swapping by up to 99.73% with negligible overheads (0.05% on average).     

TCCL:secure and efficient development of desktop cloud structure

A secure and efficient development of desktop cloud structure:TCCL (transparent computing-based cloud),which was designed under the guidance of transparent computing,was proposed.TCCL applied the method,separating calculation and storage,loading in a block streaming way which was proposed in the transparent computing theory,to the cloud desktop system,and deployed the defense module of security threats under the cloud VM (virtual machine).As a result,the TCCL could improve the security level on the cloud VMs’ system files and data files,and could optimize the cloud virtual machines' storage efficiency.     

A prediction‐based and power‐aware virtual machine allocation algorithm in three‐tier cloud data centers

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing services, the more number of cloud data centers are constructed over the globe. This makes the power consumption of cloud data center elements as a big challenge. Hereby, several software and hardware approaches have been proposed to handle this issue. However, this problem has not been optimally solved yet. In this paper, we propose an online cloud resource management with live migration of virtual machines (VMs) to reduce power consumption. To do so, a prediction‐based and power‐aware virtual machine allocation algorithm is proposed. Also, we present a three‐tier framework for energy‐efficient resource management in cloud data centers. Experimental results indicate that the proposed solution reduces the power consumption; at the same time, service‐level agreement violation (SLAV) is also improved.