Dynamic Scalability of a Consolidation Service

In the coming years, cloud environments will increasingly face energy saving issues. While consolidating the virtual machines running in a cloud is a well-accepted solution to reduce the energy consumption, ensuring the scalability of the consolidation service remains a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose an elastic consolidation service that scales according to the dynamic needs of the cloud environment. Our proposition is based on (i) virtualizing the consolidation manager, (ii) partitioning the consolidation work and (iii) regulating the consolidation scalability through an autonomic control loop. Our proposition has been tested and validated through several experiments.