Virtual Machine Consolidation with Minimization of Migration Thrashing for Cloud Data Centers

Cloud data centers consume huge amount of electrical energy bringing about in high operating costs and carbon dioxide emissions. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation utilizes live migration of virtual machines (VMs) to transfer a VM among physical servers in order to improve the utilization of resources and energy efficiency in cloud data centers. Most of the current VM consolidation approaches tend to aggressive-migrate for some types of applications such as large capacity application such as speech recognition, image processing, and decision support systems. These approaches generate a high migration thrashing because VMs are consolidated to servers according to VM’s instant resource usage without considering their overall and long-term utilization. The proposed approach, dynamic consolidation with minimization of migration thrashing (DCMMT) which prioritizes VM with high capacity, significantly reduces migration thrashing and the number of migrations to ensure service-level agreement (SLA) since it keeps VMs likely to suffer from migration thrashing in the same physical servers instead of migrating. We have performed experiments using real workload traces compared to existing aggressive-migration-based solutions; through simulations, we show that our approach improves migration thrashing metric by about 28%, number of migrations metric by about 21%, and SLAV metric by about 19%.