Energy-Efficient Management of Virtual Machines in Eucalyptus

In this paper, an approach for improving the energy efficiency of infrastructure-as-a-service clouds is presented. The approach is based on performing live migrations of virtual machines to save energy. In contrast to related work, the energy costs of live migrations including their pre- and post-processing phases are taken into account, and the approach has been implemented in the Eucalyptus open-source cloud computing system by efficiently combining a multi-layered file system and distributed replication block devices. To evaluate the proposed approach, several short- and long-term tests based on virtual machine workloads produced with common operating system benchmarks, web-server emulations as well as different MapReduce applications have been conducted. The results indicate that energy savings of up to 16 percent can be achieved in a productive Eucalyptus environment.