A distributed self-balancing policy for virtual machine management in cloud datacenters

Cloud Computing is a crucial computational paradigm for modern companies because it can discharge them from managing their ever growing IT infrastructure. Dynamically offering a plenty of computational resources, the cloud can also simplify the execution of CPU-intensive applications. Modern data centers for cloud computing are facing the challenge of a growing complexity due to the increasing number of users and their augmenting resource requests. A lot of efforts are now concentrated on providing the cloud infrastructure with autonomic behavior, so that it can take decisions about virtual machine (VM) management across the datacenter´s nodes without human intervention. While the major part of these solutions is intrinsically centralized and suffers of scalability and reliability problems, we investigate the possibility to provide the cloud with a decentralized self-organizing behavior. To this purpose we present a novel VM migration policy suitable for a distributed environment, where hosts can exchange status information with each other according to a predefined protocol. The main goal of the policy is to balance the computational load on datacenter´s physical hosts by conveniently moving virtual machines (VMs). We tested the policy performance by means of an ad hoc built simulator.