Energy Efficient Allocation of Virtual Machines in Cloud Data Centers

TLDR

The rapid growth of demand for computational power has led to large‑scale data centers that consume enormous electrical power, driving high operational costs and carbon emissions while requiring a balance between power consumption and quality of service. The study proposes an efficient resource‑management policy for virtualized cloud data centers. The policy continuously consolidates virtual machines using live migration and shuts down idle nodes to reduce power consumption while maintaining required quality of service. Evaluation shows that dynamic VM reallocation yields substantial energy savings, supporting further development of the policy.

Abstract

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.