A Heuristic-Based Approach for Dynamic VMs Consolidation in Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

Cloud computing providers have to deal with the energy-performance trade-off: minimizing energy consumption, while meeting service level agreement (SLA) requirements. This paper proposes a new heuristic approach for the dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud data centers. The fast best-fit decreasing (FBFD) algorithm for intelligent VMs allocating into hosts and dynamic utilization rate (DUR) algorithm for utilization space and VM migration are successfully proposed. We performed simulations using PlanetLab and GWDG data center workloads to compare our approach against the existing models. It has been observed that the FBFD heuristic algorithm produces better results compared to modified BFD algorithm in terms of energy consumption and SLA violation. Additionally, the time complexity of FBFD algorithm is significantly improved from the order of O((m\, \,n)) to O((m\, \,\log _2{n})). Furthermore, leaving some rates of capacity in the physical machines by the proposed DUR algorithm for VMs to be extended reduces the number of migrations which in turn improves the energy consumption and SLA violation. Our heuristic approach is evaluated using CloudSim and the results show that it performs better than the current state-of-the-art approaches.