Migration Cost and Energy-Aware Virtual Machine Consolidation Under Cloud Environments Considering Remaining Runtime

By live migration technology, multiple virtual machines (VMs) can be consolidated into a fewer physical servers and the idle ones can be shut down or switched to low-power mode, thus reducing the energy consumption of cloud data centers. However, live migration can result in performance degradation of migrated VMs, or even interrupting their services. At the same time, live migration can also aggravate the overheads of data transmissions and produce additional energy consumption in cloud data centers. All these negative influences belong to migration cost (MC) caused by VM migration, which becomes an important cost factor that can’t be ignored. Otherwise, another important concern, remaining runtime of the migrated VM, also has influence on the efficiency of VM consolidation, which is not well addressed as well. This paper investigates MC-aware VM consolidation problem and formulates the problem as a multi-constraint optimization model by considering migration cost and remaining runtime of VMs. Based on the proposed model, a heuristic algorithm, called MC-aware VM consolidation (MVC) algorithm, is developed. Finally, based on a real-world cloud trace, we conduct extensive experimental studies to verify the validity of the proposed model and algorithm. Experimental results show that, compared with some popular algorithms, MVC algorithm can effectively decrease the migration cost and, at the same time guarantee the energy consumption within a certain low level.