A Simulated Annealing Based Approach for Power Efficient Virtual Machines Consolidation

In the Cloud Computing paradigm there is an emerging Green Computing awareness, aimed at increasing the cost-efficiency of the underlying infrastructure. The pursued objective is to find the right compromise between the energy consumption and the perceived quality of service of the applications running in the cloud. Big data centers, along with the adoption of the virtualization technology, are increasingly experiencing the need to reduce consumption, because of both the environmental pollution and the economic concern. Among the novel techniques used to minimize the energy consumption wastefulness there is the Virtual Machines Consolidation, which leverages the VM live migration. The goal is to increase the overall cost-efficiency by reducing the number of active nodes. The main contributions of this paper are the proposal of a novel model for the consolidation problem and a Simulated Annealing based algorithm which solves it by evaluating the attractiveness of the possible VM migrations.