On Tackling Virtual Data Center Embedding Problem

Virtualizing data center networks has been considered a feasible alternative to satisfy the requirements of advanced cloud services. Proper mapping of virtual data center (VDC) resources to their physical counterparts, also known as virtual data center embedding, can impact the revenue of cloud providers. Similar to virtual networks, the problem of mapping virtual requests to physical infrastructures is known to be NP-hard. Although some proposals have come up with heuristics to cope with the complexity of the embedding process focusing on virtual machine placement, these solutions ignore the correlation among other data resources, such as switches and storage. In this paper, we propose a new embedding solution for data centers that, in addition to virtual machine placement, explicitly considers the relation between switches and links, allows multiple resources of the same request to be mapped to a single physical resource, and reduces resource fragmentation in terms of CPU. Simulations show that our solution results in high acceptance ratio of VDC requests, improves utilization of the physical substrate, and generates increased revenue for infrastructure providers.