Virtual machine consolidated placement based on multi-objective biogeography-based optimization

Virtual machine placement (VMP) is an important issue in selecting the most suitable set of physical hosts for a set of virtual machines in cloud computing environment. VMP problem consists of two sub problems: incremental placement (VMiP) problem and consolidated placement (VMcP) problem. The challenge in VMcP problem is how to find optimal solution effectively and efficiently as well as it is a kind of NP-hard problem. In this paper, we present a novel solution to the VMcP problem called VMPMBBO. The scheme of VMPMBBO treats the VMcP problem as a complex system, and utilizes the biogeography-based optimization (BBO) technique to optimize the virtual machine placement that minimizes both the resource waste and the power consumption at the same time. Extensive experiments are conducted using synthetic data from related literature and data from two real datasets. First of all, the necessity of VMcP has been proved by experimental results obtained by applying VMPMBBO. Then, the proposed method is compared with two existing multi-objective VMcP optimization algorithms and it is shown that VMPMBBO has better convergence characteristics and is more computationally efficient. VMPMBBO is also robust. And then, the issue of parameter setting of the proposed method has been discussed. Finally, adaptability and extensibility of VMPMBBO have also been proved. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first approach that applies biogeography-based optimization (BBO) to virtual machine placement (VMP).