An Efficient Power-Aware Resource Scheduling Strategy in Virtualized Datacenters

In the era of cloud computing, data centers are well-known to be bounded by the power wall issue. This issue lowers the profit of service providers and obstructs the expansions of data center´s scale. As virtual machine´s behavior was not explored sufficiently in classic data center´s power-saving strategies, in this paper we address the power consumption issue in the setting of a virtualized data center. We propose an efficient power-aware resource scheduling strategy that reduces data center´s power consumption effectively based on VM live migration which is a key technical feature of cloud computing. Our scheduling algorithm leverages the Xen platform and consolidates VM workloads periodically to reduce the number of running servers. To satisfy each VM´s service level agreements, our strategy keeps adjusting VM placements between scheduling rounds. We developed a power-aware data center simulator to test our algorithm. The simulator runs in time domain and includes server´s segmented linear power model. We validated our simulator using measured server power trace. Our simulation shows that compared with event-driven schedulers, our strategy improves data center power budget by 35% for random workloads resembling web-requests, and improve data center power budget by 22.7% for workloads exhibiting stable resource requirements like ScaLAPACK.