Profile-based ant colony optimization for energy-efficient virtual machine placement

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.