Energy-aware QoS-based dynamic virtual machine consolidation approach based on RL and ANN

One of the most challenging problems in cloud datacenters is the degradation of performance and energy efficiency due to the overutilization of hosts and their exposition to excessive workload. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation and migration from one host to another are strategies that have been proven to successfully bring about performance improvements and energy efficiency. These schemes help in energy optimization by moving VMs experiencing difficulty functioning on an overloaded host to another host. Similarly, by migrating VMs from an underloaded host and consolidating them, unnecessary resources have a chance to be shut down. This makes clear why the accurate detection of overloaded and underloaded hosts is of fundamental importance when energy consumption, quality of services, and service level agreements are targeted. In this paper, an energy-aware QoS-based consolidation algorithm is proposed to dynamically manage VMs in cloud datacenters. The proposed algorithm applies reinforcement learning and artificial neural networks. The first method is used to select a suitable VM for migration, while the latter helps to predict the future state of hosts and detect overloaded and underloaded hosts. We simulated the proposed algorithm using the CloudSim framework and compared it to the baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show that the proposed approach surpasses other methods in what concerns both performance and energy efficiency.