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This research develops a resource management framework for improved energy efficiency in cloud data centers through energy-efficient virtual machine placement to physical machines as well as application assignment to virtual machines. The study investigates static virtual machine placement, dynamic virtual machine placement and application assignment using ant colony optimization to minimize the total energy consumption in data centers.

Data centers are fundamental infrastructure for information technology and cloud services; however, their very high rates of energy consumption are a problem. The placement of Virtual Machines (VMs) to Physical Machines (PMs) in virtualized environments has a significant impact on the energy consumption of a data center. This is an NP-hard problem, for which an optimal solution is not practicable even for a small-scale data center. In this paper, we formulate placement of VMs to PMs in a data center as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and make use of the information from PM and VM profiles to minimize the total energy consumption of all active PMs. An Ant Colony System (ACS) embedded with new heuristics is presented for an energy-efficient solution to the optimization problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the ACS, simulation experiments are conducted on small-, medium- and large-scale data centers. The results from our ACS are compared with two existing ACS methods as well as the widely used First-Fit-Decreasing (FFD) algorithm. Our ACS is shown to outperform the two existing ACS methods and FFD in energy performance for all small-, medium- and large-scale test problems. Our ACS also exhibits good scalability with the increase in the problem size.

Cloud computing data centers contain a large number of physical machines (PMs) and virtual machine (VMs). This number can increase the energy consumption of the data centers especially when the VMs placed inappropriately on the PMs. This paper presents a new VM placement approach with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of a data center. VM placement problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. Since this problem has been proven to be an NP hard problem, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is adopted to solve the formulated problem. Information heuristic of ACO is used differently based on PM energy efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed approach scales well on large data centers and significantly outperforms selected benchmark (ACOVMP) in terms of energy consumption.

The energy consumption of a data center and hence the carbon footprint from it largely depends on the energy consumption by its active Physical Machines (PMs). Researchers have taken many attempts to minimize the data center energy consumption through the Virtual Machines (VMs) allocation into a minimal number of PMs of homogeneous types. However, the current VM placement strategies do not consider the fluctuations of resource requirements of a VM through its lifetime. To resolve the this issue, this paper introduces a novelty of profile-based VM assignment algorithm for minimizing the energy consumption in data center. Our algorithm considers the subsequent time intervals of data center based on profiling of VMs and PMs. An algorithm has been proposed and developed for finding near optimal solution for VMs placement with the objective of minimizing data center energy consumption. Our algorithm has been compared with a bin packing algorithm, First-Fit Decreasing (FFD), and experimental results have shown that our algorithm can reduce more energy consumption than the FFD algorithm and is scalable for larger test problems.