Energy-Saving Virtual Machine Scheduling in Cloud Computing with Fixed Interval Constraints

Energy efficiency has become an important measurement of scheduling algorithms for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. This paper investigates the energy-efficient virtual machine scheduling problems in IaaS clouds where users request multiple resources in fixed intervals and non-preemption for processing their virtual machines (VMs) and physical machines have bounded capacity resources. Many previous works are based on migration techniques to move on-line VMs from low utilization hosts and turn these hosts off to reduce energy consumption. However, the techniques for migration of VMs could not use in our case. The scheduling problem is NP-hard. Instead of minimizing the number used physical machines, we propose a scheduling algorithm EMinTRE-LDTF to minimize the sum of total busy time of all physical machines that is equivalent to minimize total energy consumption. In this paper, we present the proved approximation in general and special cases of the scheduling problem. Using Feitelson’s and Lublin99’s parallel workload models in the Parallel Workloads Archive, our simulation results show that algorithm EMinTRE-LDTF could reduce the total energy consumption compared with state-of-the-art algorithms including Tian’s Modified First-Fit Decreasing Earliest, Beloglazov’s Power-Aware Best-Fit Decreasing and Vector Bin-Packing Norm-based Greedy. Moreover, the EMinTRE-LDTF has less total energy consumption compared with our previous heuristic (e.g. MinDFT) in the simulations.