CAESARA - Combined Architecture for Energy Saving by Auto-Adaptive Resource Allocation

Energy consumption of data centers increased continously during the last decades. As current techniques for improving their energy efficiency are usually limited to one type of data center components, it is difficult to employ them for a holistic optimization which may utilize synergies between all components. This paper introduces architecture and working principles of the novel energy management system CAESARA that applies a holistic view for evaluating an energy-efficient virtual machine placement in current virtualization environments for minimizing the number of running energy-consuming physical machines. In contrast to existing solutions, our placement algorithm does not only aggregate load to a minimum number of servers it also discovers which servers act as most energy-efficient migration targets in conjunction with their environment (e.g. their cooling equipment). This paper presents the architecture of CAESARA and defines properties for an energy-efficient virtual machine placement algorithm. As the placement algorithm uses an energy-aware metric, it is the basis for an innovative system, which may optimize the energy efficiency of data centers in a holistic way by including any infrastructural energy consumption.