Toward a hierarchical and architecture‐based virtual machine allocation in cloud data centers

Number of cloud data centers which consists of hundreds of hosts has increased tremendously around the world due to increase in demands for cloud services. It is expected energy consumption of data centers will reach 139.8 billion Kwh by 2020. Many algorithms are proposed to reduce energy consumption as well as service level agreement violationby minimizing the number of active hosts. Current proposed algorithms do not consider data center architecture, the physical position of hosts, and energy consumption of numerous switches that are in data centers. In this paper, a novel hierarchical cloud resource management is proposed that not only minimizes the number of hosts but also aggregates virtual machines on a limited subset of data center racks and modules to minimize energy consumption. Experimental results with Cloudsim show that our proposed algorithm reduces energy consumption up to 26% and service level agreement violation up to 96%.     

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.     

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.     

Penalty‐aware and cost‐efficient resource management in cloud data centers

Today, data centers are the main source of providing cloud services through a service level agreement (SLA). Most research papers for cloud resource management concentrate on how to reduce host energy consumption and SLA violation (SLAV) to minimize operational cost. However, they do not consider the amount of penalty that cloud provider should pay to users because of SLAV. In this paper, we propose a new penalty‐aware and cost‐efficient method that considers cloud resource management as a cost problem. In this method parameters such as user budget, penalty, and host energy consumption cost play an important role in minimizing operational cost which leads to higher profit for cloud provider. The simulation results with CloudSim show that our proposed method minimizes operational cost compared to the prior resource managements. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A tree‐based algorithm for virtual infrastructure allocation with joint virtual machine and network requirements

Cloud providers have introduced the on‐demand provisioning of virtual infrastructures (VIs) to deliver virtual networks of computing resources as a service. By combining network and computing virtualization, providers allow traffic isolation between hosted VIs. Taking advantage of this opportunity, tenants have deployed private VIs with application‐optimized network topologies to increase quality of experience of final users. One of the main open challenges in this scenario is the allocation of physical resources to host VIs in accordance with quality of service computing (eg, virtual CPUs and memory) and network requirements (guaranteed bandwidth and specific network topology). Moreover, a VI can be allocated anywhere atop a network datacenter, and because of its NP‐hard complexity, the search for optimal solutions has a limited applicability in cloud providers as requesting users seek an immediate response. The present work proposes an algorithm to accomplish the VI allocation by applying tree‐based heuristics to reduce the search space, performing a joint allocation of computing and network resources. So as to accomplish this goal, the mechanism includes a strategy to convert physical and virtual graphs to trees, which later are pruned by a grouped accounting algorithm. These innovations reduce the number of comparisons required to allocate a VI. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm finds an allocation on feasible time for different cloud scenarios and VI topologies, while maintaining a high acceptance rate and a moderate physical infrastructure fragmentation.     

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.     

一种通信距离最小化的虚拟机分配算法

为了解决云资源分配过程中虚拟机通信距离较大,造成用户计算任务完成时间延长问题,提出一种最短通信距离的虚拟机分配算法.云资源管理器能够根据用户指定的虚拟机条件,将计算任务分割到合适的数据中心及其内部服务器,大大缩短了虚拟机之间的通信距离.仿真实验表明,与现有的贪婪算法和随机方法相比,提出的方法通信量更少,执行速度更快.     

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.     

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.     

Study on virtual resource allocation optimization in cloud computing environment

Most existing researches of resource allocation in data center did not take into full consideration how to decrease energy consumption.The energy efficiency virtual resource allocation for cloud computing as a multi-objective optimization problem was formulated,which was then solved by intelligent optimization algorithm.The simulation results reveal that the strategy can successfully generate schedule scheme of different numbers of servers-VM with diverse characteristics and decrease the total operating energy of data center effectively.     

Virtual machine placement optimizing to improve network performance in cloud data centers

With the wide application of virtualization technology in cloud data centers, how to effectively place virtual machine （VM） is becoming a major issue for cloud providers. The existing virtual machine placement （VMP） solutions are mainly to optimize server resources. However, they pay little consideration on network resources optimization, and they do not concern the impact of the network topology and the current network traffic. A multi-resource constraints VMP scheme is proposed. Firstly, the authors attempt to reduce the total communication traffic in the data center network, which is abstracted as a quadratic assignment problem; and then aim at optimizing network maximum link utilization （MLU）. On the condition of slight variation of the total traffic, minimizing MLU can balance network traffic distribution and reduce network congestion hotspots, a classic combinatorial optimization problem as well as NP-hard problem. Ant colony optimization and 2-opt local search are combined to solve the problem. Simulation shows that MLU is decreased by 20%, and the number of hot links is decreased by 37%.     

Energy‐aware cross‐layer resource allocation in mobile cloud

This paper proposed an energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation approach. In this paper, a hybrid cloud architecture is adopted for provisioning mobile service to mobile device users, which include nearby local cloud and remote public cloud. The computation‐intensive tasks can be processed by the remote public cloud, while the delay‐sensitive computation can be processed by the nearby local cloud. On the basis of the system context and mobile user preferences, the energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation approach can optimize the consumption of cloud resource and system performance. The cooperation and collaboration among local cloud agent, public cloud supplier, and mobile cloud user are regulated through the economic approach. The energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation is performed on the local cloud level and the public cloud level, which comprehensively considers the benefits of all participants. The energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation algorithm is proposed, which is evaluated in the experiment environment, and comparison results and analysis are discussed.     

TRACTOR: Traffic-aware and power-efficient virtual machine placement in edge-cloud data centers using artificial bee colony optimization

Technology providers heavily exploit the usage of edge-cloud data centers (ECDCs) to meet user demand while the ECDCs are large energy consumers. Concerning the decrease of the energy expenditure of ECDCs, task placement is one of the most prominent solutions for effective allocation and consolidation of such tasks onto physical machine (PM). Such allocation must also consider additional optimizations beyond power and must include other objectives, including network-traffic effectiveness. In this study, we present a multi-objective virtual machine (VM) placement scheme (considering VMs as fog tasks) for ECDCs called TRACTOR , which utilizes an artificial bee colony optimization algorithm for power and network-aware assignment of VMs onto PMs. The proposed scheme aims to minimize the network traffic of the interacting VMs and the power dissipation of the data center's switches and PMs. To evaluate the proposed VM placement solution, the Virtual Layer 2 (VL2) and three-tier network topologies are modeled and integrated into the CloudSim toolkit to justify the effectiveness of the proposed solution in mitigating the network traffic and power consumption of the ECDC. Results indicate that our proposed method is able to reduce power energy consumption by 3.5% while decreasing network traffic and power by 15% and 30%, respectively, without affecting other QoS parameters.     

Enhanced security‐aware technique and ontology data access control in cloud computing

Nowadays, security and data access control are some of the major concerns in the cloud storage unit, especially in the medical field. Therefore, a security‐aware mechanism and ontology‐based data access control (SA‐ODAC) has been developed to improve security and access control in cloud computing. The model proposed in this research work is based on two operational methods, namely, secure awareness technique (SAT) and ontology‐based data access control (ODAC), to improve security and data access control in cloud computing. The SAT technique is developed to provide security for medical data in cloud computing, based on encryption, splitting and adding files, and decryption. The ODAC ontology is launched to control unauthorized persons accessing data from storage and create owner and administrator rules to allow access to data and is proposed to improve security and restrict access to data. To manage the key of the SAT technique, the secret sharing scheme is introduced in the proposed framework. The implementation of the algorithm is performed by MATLAB, and its performance is verified in terms of delay, encryption time, encryption time, and ontology processing time and is compared with role‐based access control (RBAC), context‐aware RBAC and context‐aware task RBAC, and security analysis of advanced encryption standard and data encryption standard. Ultimately, the proposed data access control and security scheme in SA‐ODAC have achieved better performance and outperform the conventional technique.     

云计算中基于Shapley值改进遗传算法的虚拟机调度模型

云计算系统具有服务器规模大、用户范围广的特点,但同时也消耗了大量的能源,导致云供应商的高运营成本和高碳排放等问题。云计算高度虚拟化,如何分配和管理其虚拟资源,从而保证高效的物理资源利用和能耗控制,是一个多参数博弈过程,同时也是该领域的一个研究热点。提出了一种虚拟机调度模型及基于Shapley 值的遗传算法（SV-GA）,可通过经济学概念Shapley 值计算出参与工作的物理机贡献值,并通过该贡献值修正遗传算法中变异步骤的概率参数,从而完成虚拟机调度的任务。实验结果表明,与Max-Min、LrMmt及DE算法相比,SV-GA在虚拟机调度过程中的迁移时间、次数、SLA违背率、能耗等多参数博弈中具有优异的表现。     

基于CloudStack和OpenStack的KVM虚拟机跨平台迁移方法

在CloudStack平台与OpenStack平台共存的环境中,为了使CloudStack平台中已创建的KVM虚拟机在迁移到OpenStack平台后可以被OpenStack平台的控制节点正确识别并接管,提出了一种将CloudStack平台中已经存在的虚拟机动态迁移到OpenStack平台的方法。通过将传统基于本地存储的KVM虚拟机迁移方法与CloudStack以及OpenStack云计算平台自身特点相结合,重新对虚拟机迁移相关文件进行组合,实现了虚拟机跨平台的动态迁移。实验结果表明,本方法不但可以完成将KVM虚拟机成功从CloudStack平台迁移到OpenStack平台的任务,而且在时间上与传统方法相比并未产生其他时间成本。     

Optimization‐based workload distribution in geographically distributed data centers: A survey

Energy efficiency is a contemporary and challenging issue in geographically distributed data centers. These data centers consume significantly high energy and cast a negative impact on the energy resources and environment. To minimize the energy cost and the environmental impacts, Internet service providers use different approaches such as geographical load balancing (GLB). GLB refers to the placement of data centers in diverse geolocations to exploit variations in electricity prices with the objective to minimize the total energy cost. GLB helps to minimize the overall energy cost, achieve quality of service, and maximize resource utilization in geo‐distributed data centers by employing optimal workload distribution and resource utilization in the real time. In this paper, we summarize various optimization‐based workload distribution strategies and optimization techniques proposed in recent research works based on commonly used optimization factors such as workload type, load balancer, availability of renewable energy, energy storage, and data center server specification in geographically distributed data centers. The survey presents a systemized and a novel taxonomy of workload distribution in data centers. Moreover, we also debate various challenges and open research issues along with their possible solutions.     

OW‐SVM: Ontology and whale optimization‐based support vector machine for privacy‐preserved medical data classification in cloud

Cloud is a multitenant architecture that allows the cloud users to share the resources via servers and is used in various applications, including data classification. Data classification is a widely used data mining technique for big data analysis. It helps the learners to discover hidden data patterns by training massive data collected from the real world. Because this trained model is the private asset of an entity, it should be protected from all other noncollaborative entities. Therefore, it is essential to take effective measures to preserve the confidential data. The objective of this paper is to preserve the privacy of the confidential data in the cloud environment by introducing the medical data classification method. In view of that, this paper presents a method for medical data classification using a novel ontology and whale optimization‐based support vector machine (OW‐SVM) approach. Initially, privacy‐preserved data are developed adopting Kronecker product bat approach, and then, ontology is built for the feature selection process. Ontology and whale optimization‐based support vector machine is then proposed by integrating ontology and whale optimization algorithm into SVM, in which ontology and whale optimization algorithm is used for the feasible selection of kernel parameters. The experiment is done using 3 heart disease datasets, such as Cleveland, Switzerland, and Hungarian. In a comparative analysis, the performance of the OW‐SVM approach is compared with that of K‐nearest neighbor, Naive Bayes, decision tree, SVM, and OW‐SVM, using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and fitness, as the evaluation metrics. The OW‐SVM approach could achieve maximum performance with accuracy of 83.21%, the sensitivity of 91.49%, specificity of 73%, and fitness of 81.955, outperforming existing comparative techniques.     

Cluster based resource allocation in two‐tier HetNets with hierarchical throughput constraints

Two‐tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets), formed by deploying small cell base stations (SBSs) over existing macrocells, can enhance the network performance in future fifth generation network. However, the cross‐/co‐tier interference in HetNets also will severely influence the user throughput of both tiers. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation and interference mitigation problem in cluster based orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) two‐tier HetNets. In a typical cluster, one SBS is selected as the cluster head to allocate resources among all small cells to guarantee their throughput requirements. Hybrid access policy enables small cells to suppress the cross‐tier interference and earn additional revenue from macrocells, but it also leads to decrease of available resources for small cell users (SUs). To compensate hybrid access SBSs for their resources loss, we impose hierarchical SU throughput constraints on the optimization problem, which guarantee these small cells more resources than closed access ones. Besides, the cross‐tier interference constraint is also considered to protect the transmissions of macrocell users. Accordingly, a subgradient iteration based resource allocation algorithm is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can satisfy SU throughput constraints of all small cells with different access policies and guarantee quality of service requirements of all accessed macrocell users in hybrid access small cells.     

A genetic‐based decision algorithm for multisite computation offloading in mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing is a promising approach to improve the mobile device's efficiency in terms of energy consumption and execution time. In this context, mobile devices can offload the computation‐intensive parts of their applications to powerful cloud servers. However, they should decide what computation‐intensive parts are appropriate for offloading to be beneficial instead of local execution on the mobile device. Moreover, in the real world, different types of clouds/servers with heterogeneous processing speeds are available that should be considered for offloading. Because making offloading decision in multisite context is an NP‐complete, obtaining an optimal solution is time consuming. Hence, we use a near optimal decision algorithm to find the best‐possible partitioning for offloading to multisite clouds/servers. We use a genetic algorithm and adjust it for multisite offloading problem. Also, genetic operators are modified to reduce the ineffective solutions and hence obtain the best‐possible solutions in a reasonable time. We evaluated the efficiency of the proposed method using graphs of real mobile applications in simulation experiments. The evaluation results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms other counterparts in terms of energy consumption, execution time, and weighted cost model.