Multi-objective dynamic virtual machine consolidation in the cloud using ant colony system

In this paper, we present a novel multi-objective ant colony system algorithm for virtual machine (VM) consolidation in cloud data centres. The proposed algorithm builds VM migration plans, which are then used to minimise over-provisioning of physical machines (PMs) by consolidating VMs on under-utilised PMs. It optimises two objectives that are ordered by their importance. The first and foremost objective in the proposed algorithm is to maximise the number of released PMs. Moreover, since VM migration is a resource-intensive operation, it also tries to minimise the number of VM migrations. The proposed algorithm is empirically evaluated in a series of experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides an efficient solution for VM consolidation in cloud data centres. Moreover, it outperforms two existing ant colony optimization-based VM consolidation algorithms in terms of number of released PMs and number of VM migrations.     

Power-efficient distributed scheduling of virtual machines using workload-aware consolidation techniques

There is growing demand on datacenters to serve more clients with reasonable response times, demanding more hardware resources, and higher energy consumption. Energy-aware datacenters have thus been amongst the forerunners to deploy virtualization technology to multiplex their physical machines (PMs) to as many virtual machines (VMs) as possible in order to utilize their hardware resources more effectively and save power. The achievement of this objective strongly depends on how smart VMs are consolidated. In this paper, we show that blind consolidation of VMs not only does not reduce the power consumption of datacenters but it can lead to energy wastage. We present four models, namely the target system model, the application model, the energy model, and the migration model, to identify the performance interferences between processor and disk utilizations and the costs of migrating VMs. We also present a consolidation fitness metric to evaluate the merit of consolidating a number of known VMs on a PM based on the processing and storage workloads of VMs. We then propose an energy-aware scheduling algorithm using a set of objective functions in terms of this consolidation fitness metric and presented power and migration models. The proposed scheduling algorithm assigns a set of VMs to a set of PMs in a way to minimize the total power consumption of PMs in the whole datacenter. Empirical results show nearly 24.9% power savings and nearly 1.2% performance degradation when the proposed scheduling algorithm is used compared to when other scheduling algorithms are used.     

Energy-efficient Tasks Scheduling Heuristics with Multi-constraints in Virtualized Clouds

Reducing energy consumption has become an important task in cloud datacenters. Many existing scheduling approaches in cloud datacenters try to consolidate virtual machines (VMs) to the minimum number of physical hosts and hence minimize the energy consumption. VM live migration technique is used to dynamically consolidate VMs to as few PMs as possible; however, it introduces high migration overhead. Furthermore, the cost factor is usually not taken into account by existing approaches, which will lead to high payment cost for cloud users. In this paper, we aim to achieve energy reduction for cloud providers and payment saving for cloud users, and at the same time, without introducing VM migration overhead and without compromising deadline guarantees for user tasks. Motivated by the fact that some of the tasks have relatively loose deadlines, we can further reduce energy consumption by proactively postponing the tasks without waking up new physical machines (PMs). A heuristic task scheduling algorithm called Energy and Deadline Aware with Non-Migration Scheduling (EDA-NMS) algorithm is proposed, which exploits the looseness of task deadlines and tries to postpone the execution of the tasks that have loose deadlines in order to avoid waking up new PMs. When determining the VM instant types, EDA-NMS selects the instant types that are just sufficient to guarantee task deadline to reduce user payment cost. The results of extensive experiments show that our algorithm performs better than other existing algorithms on achieving energy efficiency without introducing VM migration overhead and without compromising deadline guarantees.     

Server consolidation techniques in virtualized data centers of cloud environments: A systematic literature review

At the virtualized data centers, services are presented by active virtual machines (VMs) in physical machines (PMs). The manner in which VMs are mapped to PMs affects the performance of data centers and the energy efficiency. By employing the server consolidation technique, it is possible to configure the VMs on a smaller number of PMs, while the quality of service is guaranteed. In this way, the rate of active PM utilization increases and fewer active PMs would be required. Moreover, the server consolidation technique reacts to the management of underloaded and overloaded PMs by using the VM migration technology. Considering the capabilities of the server consolidation technique and its role in developing the cloud computing infrastructure, many researches have been conducted in this context. Still, a comprehensive and systematic study has not yet been performed on various consolidation techniques to check the capabilities, advantages, and disadvantages of current approaches. In this paper, a systematic study is conducted on a number of credible researches related to server consolidation techniques. In order to do so and by studying the selected works, proposed solutions are categorized based on the type of decision for running the consolidation algorithm in 4 groups of static method, dynamic method, prediction‐based dynamic method, and hybrid method. Thereafter, the advantages and disadvantages of suggested approaches are studied and compared in each research by specifying the technique and idea applied therein. In addition, by categorizing aims of researches and specifying assessment parameters, optimization approaches and type of architecture, a possibility has been provided to get familiarized with the views of the researchers.     

基于混合群智能的节能虚拟机整合方法

数据中心的虚拟机（virtual machine,VM）整合技术是当今云计算领域的一个研究热点.要在保证服务质量（QoS）的前提下尽可能地降低云数据中心的服务器能耗,本质上是一个多目标优化的NP难问题.为了更好地解决该问题,面向异构服务器云环境提出了一种基于差分进化与粒子群优化的混合群智能节能虚拟机整合方法（HSI-VMC）.该方法包括基于峰值效能比的静态阈值超载服务器检测策略（PEBST）、基于迁移价值比的待迁移虚拟机选择策略（MRB）、目标服务器选择策略、混合离散化启发式差分进化粒子群优化虚拟机放置算法（HDH-DEPSO）以及基于负载均值的欠载服务器处理策略（AVG）.其中,PEBST,MRB,AVG策略的结合能够根据服务器的峰值效能比和CPU的负载均值检测出超载和欠载服务器,并选出合适的虚拟机进行迁移,降低负载波动引起的服务水平协议违约率（SLAV）和虚拟机迁移的次数;HDH-DEPSO算法结合DE和PSO的优点,能够搜索出更优的虚拟机放置方案,使服务器尽可能地保持在峰值效能比下运行,降低服务器的能耗开销.基于真实云环境数据集（PlanetLab/Mix/Gan）的一系列实验结果表明：HSI-VMC方法与当前主流的几种节能虚拟机整合方法相比,能够更好地兼顾多个QoS指标,并有效地降低云数据中心的服务器能耗开销.     

Software consolidation as an efficient energy and cost saving solution

Virtual machines (VM) are used in cloud computing environments to isolate different software. They also support live migration, and thus dynamic VM consolidation. This possibility can be used to reduce power consumption in the cloud. However, consolidation in cloud environments is limited due to reliance on VMs, mainly due to their memory overhead. For instance, over a 4-month period in a real cloud located in Grenoble (France), we observed that 805 VMs used less than 12% of the CPU (of the active physical machines). This paper presents a solution introducing dynamic software consolidation. Software consolidation makes it possible to dynamically collocate several software applications on the same VM to reduce the number of VMs used. This approach can be combined with VM consolidation which collocates multiple VMs on a reduced number of physical machines. Software consolidation can be used in a private cloud to reduce power consumption, or by a client of a public cloud to reduce the number of VMs used, thus reducing costs. The solution was tested with a cloud hosting JMS messaging and Internet servers. The evaluations were performed using both the SPECjms2007 benchmark and an enterprise LAMP benchmark on both a VMware private cloud and Amazon EC2 public cloud. The results show that our approach can reduce the energy consumed in our private cloud by about 40% and the charge for VMs on Amazon EC2 by about 40.5%.     

云计算环境下软硬件节能和负载均衡策略

针对云计算服务环境下软硬件节能和负载均衡优化问题,提出一种自适应的云计算环境下虚拟机(VM)动态迁移软节能策略。该策略采用常用的硬件能耗感知技术——动态电压频率调节(DVFS)来实现分段优化的系统部件静态节能,又通过VM在线迁移技术实现云平台的动态自适应软件节能。在CloudSim云仿真平台下对比实现DVFS静态节能和自适应负载均衡的软节能策略,经PlanetLab云平台监测数据验证,结果表明：软硬结合的自适应能耗感知策略能够高效节能96%; DVFS+MAD_MMT节能策略(采用平均绝对偏差算法判定主机是否超载,基于最短迁移时间(MMT)原则选择VM移出)     

资源调度等待开销感知的虚拟机整合

近年来,数据中心庞大的能源开销问题引起广泛关注.虚拟化管理平台可以通过虚拟机迁移技术将虚拟机整合到更少的服务器上,从而提高数据中心能源有效性.对面向数据中心节能的虚拟机整合研究工作进行调研,并总结虚拟机整合研究存在的3个挑战.针对已有工作未考虑虚拟机等待资源调度带来的服务器资源额外开销这种现象,开展了资源调度等待开销感知的虚拟机整合研究.从理论和实验上证明了在具有实际意义的约束条件下,存在着虚拟机等待资源调度带来的服务器资源额外开销,且随着整合虚拟机数量的增长保持稳定.基于典型工作负载的实验结果表明,这个额外开销平均占据了11.7%的服务器资源开销.此外,提出了资源预留整合（MRC）算法,用于改进已有的虚拟机整合算法.算法模拟实验结果表明,MRC算法相比于常用的虚拟机整合算法FFD（first fit decreasing）,明显降低了服务器资源溢出概率.     

Integrating QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems for delay-sensitive applications

Cloud computing provides scalable computing and storage resources over the Internet. These scalable resources can be dynamically organized as many virtual machines (VMs) to run user applications based on a pay-per-use basis. The required resources of a VM are sliced from a physical machine (PM) in the cloud computing system. A PM may hold one or more VMs. When a cloud provider would like to create a number of VMs, the main concerned issue is the VM placement problem, such that how to place these VMs at appropriate PMs to provision their required resources of VMs. However, if two or more VMs are placed at the same PM, there exists certain degree of interference between these VMs due to sharing non-sliceable resources, e.g. I/O resources. This phenomenon is called as the VM interference. The VM interference will affect the performance of applications running in VMs, especially the delay-sensitive applications. The delay-sensitive applications have quality of service (QoS) requirements in their data access delays. This paper investigates how to integrate QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems, such as the QoS-aware VM placement (QAVMP) problem. In addition to fully exploiting the resources of PMs, the QAVMP problem considers the QoS requirements of user applications and the VM interference reduction. Therefore, in the QAVMP problem, there are following three factors: resource utilization, application QoS, and VM interference. We first formulate the QAVMP problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model by integrating the three factors as the profit of cloud provider. Due to the computation complexity of the ILP model, we propose a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve the QAVMP problem. In the heuristic algorithm, a bipartite graph is modeled to represent all the possible placement relationships between VMs and PMs. Then, the VMs are gradually placed at their preferable PMs to maximize the profit of cloud provider as much as possible. Finally, simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm by comparing with other VM placement algorithms.     

Virtual machine selection and placement for dynamic consolidation in Cloud computing environment

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) in a data center is an effective way to reduce the energy consumption and improve physical resource utilization. Determining which VMs should be migrated from an overloaded host directly influences the VM migration time and increases energy consumption for the whole data center, and can cause the service level of agreement (SLA), delivered by providers and users, to be violated. So when designing a VM selection policy, we not only consider CPU utilization, but also define a variable that represents the degree of resource satisfaction to select the VMs. In addition, we propose a novel VM placement policy that prefers placing a migratable VM on a host that has the minimum correlation coefficient. The bigger correlation coefficient a host has, the greater the influence will be on VMs located on that host after the migration. Using CloudSim, we run simulations whose results let draw us to conclude that the policies we propose in this paper perform better than existing policies in terms of energy consumption, VM migration time, and SLA violation percentage.     

云数据中心网络中的先应式碎片整理算法

在云数据中心网络内,虚拟机（Virtual machine, VM）被动态创建和下线,这就导致资源碎片不被后续VM请求所利用。为解决上述问题,以最小化使用服务器数 量为目标的服务器整合技术被提出。虽然这种方法可以在某一时间段内减少资源碎片,但却付出了较大的VM迁移代价。因此本文提出了一种基于预测的先应式碎片 整理算法,在减少无效VM迁移的同时,将资源碎片重新整合为可用的连续资源,从而最大化VM收益。文中对此问题进行了数学定义,随后设计了启发式方法获取近似最优解。仿真结果表明,所提算法能够获取最大收益,并能够大幅度降低VM迁移成本。     

SLA-driven container consolidation with usage prediction for green cloud computing

Since service level agreement(SLA)is essentially used to maintain reliable quality of service between cloud providers and clients in cloud environment,there has been a growing effort in reducing power consumption while complying with the SLA by maximizing physical machine(PM)-level utilization and load balancing techniques in infrastructure as a service.However,with the recent introduction of container as a service by cloud providers,containers are increasingly popular and will become the major deployment model in the cloud environment and specifically in platform as a service.Therefore,reducing power consumption while complying with the SLA at virtual machine(VM)-level becomes essential.In this context,we exploit a container consolidation scheme with usage prediction to achieve the above objectives.To obtain a reliable characterization of overutilized and underutilized PMs,our scheme jointly exploits the current and predicted CPU utilization based on local history of the considered PMs in the process of the container consolidation.We demonstrate our solution through simulations on real workloads.The experimental results show that the container consolidation scheme with usage prediction reduces the power consumption,number of container migrations,and average number of active VMs while complying with the SLA.     

OpenStack Neat: a framework for dynamic and energy‐efficient consolidation of virtual machines in OpenStack clouds

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is an efficient approach for improving the utilization of physical resources and reducing energy consumption in cloud data centers. Despite the large volume of research published on this topic, there are very few open‐source software systems implementing dynamic VM consolidation. In this paper, we propose an architecture and open‐source implementation of OpenStack Neat, a framework for dynamic VM consolidation in OpenStack clouds. OpenStack Neat can be configured to use custom VM consolidation algorithms and transparently integrates with existing OpenStack deployments without the necessity of modifying their configuration. In addition, to foster and encourage further research efforts in the area of dynamic VM consolidation, we propose a benchmark suite for evaluating and comparing dynamic VM consolidation algorithms. The proposed benchmark suite comprises OpenStack Neat as the base software framework, a set of real‐world workload traces, performance metrics and evaluation methodology. As an application of the proposed benchmark suite, we conduct an experimental evaluation of OpenStack Neat and several dynamic VM consolidation algorithms on a five‐node testbed, which shows significant benefits of dynamic VM consolidation resulting in up to 33% energy savings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

虚拟云下满足多重约束的时限敏感任务调度算法

目前以虚拟云服务平台作为强大计算平台的虚拟云环境下,许多现存调度方法致力于合并虚拟机以减少物理机数目,从而达到减少能源消耗的目的,但会引入高额虚拟机迁移成本;此外,现存方法也没有考虑导致用户高额支付成本的成本因子影响。以减少云服务提供者能源消耗和云服务终端用户支付成本为目标,同时保障用户任务的时限要求,提出一种能源与时限可感知的非迁移调度（EDA-NMS）算法。EDA-NMS利用任务时限的松弛度,延迟宽松时限任务的执行从而无需唤醒新的物理机,更无需引入虚拟机动态迁移成本,以达到减少能源消耗的目的。多重扩展实验结果表明,EDA-NMS采用成本和能耗有效的虚拟机实例类型组合方案,与主动及响应式调度（PRS）算法相比,在减少静态能耗的同时,能更有效地满足用户关键任务的敏感时限并确保用户支付成本最低。     

基于动态调整阈值的虚拟机迁移算法

针对当前数据中心服务器能耗优化和虚拟机迁移时机合理性问题,提出一种基于动态调整阈值（DAT）的虚拟机迁移算法。该算法首先通过统计分析物理机历史负载数据动态地调整虚拟机迁移的阈值门限,然后通过延时触发和预测物理机的负载趋势确定虚拟机迁移时机。最后将该算法应用到实验室搭建的数据中心平台上进行实验验证,结果表明基于DAT的虚拟机迁移算法比静态阈值法关闭的物理机数量更多,云数据中心能耗更低。基于DAT的虚拟机迁移算法能根据物理机的负载变化动态迁移虚拟机,达到提高物理机资源利用率、降低数据中心能耗、提高虚拟机迁移效率的目的。     

Power-efficient assignment of virtual machines to physical machines

Motivated by current trends in cloud computing, we study a version of the generalized assignment problem where a set of virtual processors has to be implemented by a set of identical processors. For literature consistency, we say that a set of virtual machines (VMs) is assigned to a set of physical machines (PMs). The optimization criterion is to minimize the power consumed by all the PMs. We term the problem Virtual Machine Assignment (VMA). Crucial differences with previous work include a variable number of PMs, that each VM must be assigned to exactly one PM (i.e., VMs cannot be implemented fractionally), and a minimum power consumption for each active PM. Such infrastructure may be strictly constrained in the number of PMs or in the PMs’ capacity, depending on how costly (in terms of power consumption) it is to add a new PM to the system or to heavily load some of the existing PMs. Low usage or ample budget yields models where PM capacity and/or the number of PMs may be assumed unbounded for all practical purposes. We study four VMA problems depending on whether the capacity or the number of PMs is bounded or not. Specifically, we study hardness and online competitiveness for a variety of cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of the VMA problem for this cost function.     

SAVE: self-adaptive consolidation of virtual machines for energy efficiency of CPU-intensive applications in the cloud

The Journal of Supercomputing - In virtualized data centers, consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) on minimizing the number of total physical machines (PMs) has been recognized as a very...     

Network-aware virtual machine migration in an overcommitted cloud

Virtualization, which acts as the underlying technology for cloud computing, enables large amounts of third-party applications to be packed into virtual machines (VMs). VM migration enables servers to be reconsolidated or reshuffled to reduce the operational costs of data centers. The network traffic costs for VM migration currently attract limited attention.However, traffic and bandwidth demands among VMs in a data center account for considerable total traffic. VM migration also causes additional data transfer overhead, which would also increase the network cost of the data center.This study considers a network-aware VM migration (NetVMM) problem in an overcommitted cloud and formulates it into a non-deterministic polynomial time-complete problem. This study aims to minimize network traffic costs by considering the inherent dependencies among VMs that comprise a multi-tier application and the underlying topology of physical machines and to ensure a good trade-off between network communication and VM migration costs.The mechanism that the swarm intelligence algorithm aims to find is an approximate optimal solution through repeated iterations to make it a good solution for the VM migration problem. In this study, genetic algorithm (GA) and artificial bee colony (ABC) are adopted and changed to suit the VM migration problem to minimize the network cost. Experimental results show that GA has low network costs when VM instances are small. However, when the problem size increases, ABC is advantageous to GA. The running time of ABC is also nearly half than that of GA. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use ABC to solve the NetVMM problem.     

Rigorous results on the effectiveness of some heuristics for the consolidation of virtual machines in a cloud data center

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud data center can be used to minimize power consumption. Beloglazov et al. have proposed the MM (Minimization of Migrations) heuristic for selecting the VMs to migrate from under- or over-utilized hosts, as well as the MBFD (Modified Best Fit Decreasing) heuristic for deciding the placement of the migrated VMs. According to their simulation results, these heuristics work very well in practice. In this paper, we investigate what performance guarantees can be rigorously proven for the heuristics. In particular, we establish that MM is optimal with respect to the number of selected VMs of an over-utilized host and it is a 1.5-approximation with respect to the decrease in utilization. On the other hand, we show that the result of MBFD can be arbitrarily far from the optimum. Moreover, we show that even if both MM and MBFD deliver optimal results, their combination does not necessarily result in optimal VM consolidation, but approximation results can be proven under suitable technical conditions. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first rigorously proven results on the effectiveness of also practically useful heuristic algorithms for the VM consolidation problem.     

A dynamic VM consolidation technique for QoS and energy consumption in cloud environment

Cloud-based data centers consume a significant amount of energy which is a costly procedure. Virtualization technology, which can be regarded as the first step in the cloud by offering benefits like the virtual machine and live migration, is trying to overcome this problem. Virtual machines host workload, and because of the variability of workload, virtual machines consolidation is an effective technique to minimize the total number of active servers and unnecessary migrations and consequently improves energy consumption. Effective virtual machine placement and migration techniques act as a key issue to optimize the consolidation process. In this paper, we present a novel virtual machine consolidation technique to achieve energy–QoS–temperature balance in the cloud data center. We simulated our proposed technique in CloudSim simulation. Results of evaluation certify that physical machine temperature, SLA, and migration technique together control the energy consumption and QoS in a cloud data center.