Energy Efficient Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

Cloud computing services have been on the rise over the past few decades, which has led to an increase in the number of data centers worldwide which increasingly consume more and more amount of energy for their operation, leading to high carbon dioxide emissions and also high operation costs. Cloud computing infrastructures are designed to support the accessibility and deployment of various service oriented applications by the users. The resources are the major source of the power consumption in data centers along with air conditioning and cooling equipment. Moreover the energy consumption in the cloud is proportional to the resource utilization and data centers are almost the worlds highest consumers of electricity. It is therefore, the need of the hour to devise efficient consolidation schemes for the cloud model to minimize energy and increase Return of Investment(ROI) for the users by decreasing the operating costs. The consolidation problem is NP-complete in nature, which requires heuristic techniques to get a sub-optimal solution. The complexity of the problem increases with increase in cloud infrastructure. We have proposed a new consolidation scheme for the virtual machines(VMs) by improving the host overload detection phase of the scheme. The resulting scheme is effective in reducing the energy and the level of Service Level Agreement(SLA) violations both, to a considerable extent.
For testing the performance of our implementation on cloud we need a simulation environment that can provide us an environment with system and behavioural modelling of the actual cloud computing components, and can generate results that can help us in the analysis so that we can deploy them on actual clouds. CloudSim is one such simulation toolkit that allows us to test and analyse our allocation and selection algorithms. In this thesis we have used CloudSim version 3.0.3 to test and analyse our policies and modifications in the current policies. The advantages of using CloudSim 3.0.3 is that it takes very less effort and time to implement cloud-based application and we can test the performance of application services in heterogeneous Cloud environments. The observations are validated by simulating the experiment using the CLoudSim framework and the data provided by PlanetLab.