SoftMap: on minimizing software costs using VM consolidation

Virtual machine consolidation, enabled by virtualization, has emerged as a promising technology to reduce hardware and facilities cost. However, dynamic consolidation does not take into account the software costs, while coming up with a placement of virtual machines to servers. Software costs are an important component of data center cost and has been increasing over the years. We present a model to capture all aspects of data center costs including software license costs. We also extend a popular consolidation algorithm [5] to reduce software license costs, while minimizing hardware, facilities, and migration costs.