Profile-guided three-phase virtual resource management for energy efficiency of data centers

Energy efficiency is a critical issue in the management of data centers, which form the backbone of cloud computing. Virtual resource management has a significant impact on improving the energy efficiency of data centers. Despite the progress in this area, virtual resource management has been considered mainly at two separate levels: application assignment and virtual machine placement. It has not been well investigated in a unified framework for both levels, limiting further improvement in the energy efficiency of data centers. To address this issue, this paper formulates the virtual resource management problem for energy efficiency as a constrained optimization problem. Then, the paper simplifies the problem through profile-guided task classification and problem decomposition for complexity reduction and improved energy efficiency. After that, a three-phase framework and algorithms are presented for profiling and profile updating, task classification and application assignment, and successive virtual machine placement. Experimental studies show energy savings of 8% to 12% by the three-phase framework compared to the existing technique.