Heuristic based Energy-aware Resource Allocation by Dynamic Consolidation of Virtual Machines in Cloud Data Center

Rapid growth of the IT industry has led to significant energy consumption in the last decade. Data centers swallow an enormous amount of electrical energy and have high operating costs and carbon dioxide excretions. In response to this, the dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) allows for efficient resource management and reduces power consumption through the live migration of VMs in the hosts. Moreover, each client typically has a service level agreement (SLA), this leads to stipulations in dealing with energy-performance trade-offs, as aggressive consolidation may lead to performance degradation beyond the negotiation. In this paper we propose a heuristic based resource allocation of VM selection and a VM allocation approach that aims to minimize the total energy consumption and operating costs while meeting the client-level SLA. Our experiment results demonstrate significant enhancements in cloud providers’ profit and energy savings while improving the SLA at a certain level.