Utilization-based VM consolidation scheme for power efficiency in cloud data centers

Cloud computing offers utility-oriented services to users, which is supported by large-scale data center. Although virtualized data centers provide high performance computing service, they also consume enormous amount of power. To solve the problem, dynamic consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs) is considered as an efficient way to reduce power consumption and guarantee Quality of Service (QoS). Live migration is applied into the dynamic consolidation, which allows VMs to be migrated to other hosts and aims to minimize the number of hosts in data centers. However, the migration overhead is essential to be taken into account and massive migrations will lead to performance degradation and extra power consumption. In this paper, we propose a utilization-based migration algorithm (UMA) to migrate VMs to stable hosts, which efficiently reduces migration time and power consumption. Experiment results show that our UMA can reduce about 77.5%–82.4% migrations and save up to 39.3% –42.2% power consumption compared with the MinPower policy.