An improved thermodynamic simulated annealing-based approach for resource-skewness-aware and power-efficient virtual machine consolidation in cloud datacenters

Cloud computing attracted great attention in both industry and research communities for the sake of its ubiquitous, elasticity and economic services. The first class concern of cloud providers is power management for both reducing their total cost of ownership and green computing objectives. To reach the goal, a system framework is presented which has different modules. The main concentration of the paper is on virtual machine (VM) consolidation module which launches users requested VMs on the minimum number of active servers to reduce datacenter total power consumption (TPC). In this paper, the VMs consolidation is abstracted to two-dimensional bin-packing problem and also is formulated to an integer linear programming. Since the papers in the literature scarcely are aware of skewness in resources of requested VMs and for discrete nature of search space, this paper presents the resource skewness-aware VMs consolidation algorithm based on improved thermodynamic simulated annealing approach because resource skewness potentially compels the algorithm to activate additional servers. The proposed SA-based algorithm is validated in extensive scenarios with different resource skewness in comparison with two heuristics and two meta-heuristics. The average results reported from different scenarios proves superiority of proposed algorithm in comparison with other approaches in terms of the number of used servers, TPC, and total resource wastage of datacenter.