Virtual Machine Consolidation for Datacenter Energy Improvement

Abstract: Rapid growth and proliferation of cloud computing services around the world has increased the necessity and significance of improving the energy efficiency of could implementations. Virtual machines (VM) comprise the backend of most, if not all, cloud computing services. Several VMs are often consolidated on a physical machine to better utilize its resources. We take into account the cooling and network structure of the datacenter hosting the physical machines when consolidating the VMs so that fewer racks and routers are employed, without compromising the service-level agreements, so that unused routing and cooling equipment can be turned off to reduce energy consumption. Our experimental results on four benchmarks shows that our technique improves energy consumption of servers, network equipment, and cooling systems by 2.5%, 18.8%, and 28.2% respectively, resulting in a total of 14.7% improvement on average in the entire datacenter.