Energy Efficient Allocation of Virtual Machines in Cloud Data Centers

Rapid growth of the demand for computational power has led to the creation of large-scale data centers. They consume enormous amounts of electrical power resulting in high operational costs and carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, modern Cloud computing environments have to provide high Quality of Service (QoS) for their customers resulting in the necessity to deal with power-performance trade-off. We propose an efficient resource management policy for virtualized Cloud data centers. The objective is to continuously consolidate VMs leveraging live migration and switch off idle nodes to minimize power consumption, while providing required Quality of Service. We present evaluation results showing that dynamic reallocation of VMs brings substantial energy savings, thus justifying further development of the proposed policy.