Application of Virtual Machine Consolidation in Cloud Computing Systems

Abstract Cloud systems play a vital and significant role in our daily lives due to various internet services. For instance, email services, social networks, and others. Consequently, their energy consumption has also become an increasingly essential concern in Cloud Computing Systems (CCSs). Virtualization technologies are widely used to facilitate the management of CCSs and reduce their energy consumption. Virtualization enables live migration of Virtual Machines (VMs) where several VMs can be loaded on some Physical machines (PMs) called VM consolidation. A VM consolidation algorithm can be an effective technique for reducing energy consumption, operational cost, hardware cost, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) compliance/violation, CO2 emissions, and enhancing the hardware and service reliability, performance, and hardware lifetime, load balancing, and utilization in CCSs. Essentially, VM consolidation must minimize energy utilization and service quality in the cloud system. This study presents a taxonomy comprising resource assignment method, metrics, objective functions, migration methods, algorithmic methods, co-location criteria of VMs, architectures, workload dataset, and evaluation approaches in VM consolidation CCSs. Also, we reviewed related work regarding the resources of PMs, algorithm methods, metrics, architectures, and the objectives in static/dynamic VM consolidation.