A multi-objective approach for energy-efficient and reliable dynamic VM consolidation in cloud data centers

The rapid growth of cloud computing in the last decade has led to an increasing concern about the energy requirement of cloud data centers. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an effective way to tackle this issue, where VMs are executed on as few physical machines (PMs) as possible. Meanwhile, VM placement must be performed strategically, by considering different factors of the available resources to optimal exploitation of them. Moreover, a major challenge is the system’s reliability degradation because of the high frequency of consolidation and placing VMs on unreliable PMs. In this paper, we address the problem by introducing a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) model to predict future resource usage. Using the DTMC model along with the reliability model of PMs leads to more accurate PMs categorization based on their status. Then, a multi-objective VM placement approach is proposed to achieve the optimal VMs to PMs mapping using the ε-dominance-based multi-objective artificial bee colony (ε-MOABC) algorithm which can efficiently balance the overall energy consumption, resource wastage, and the system reliability to meet SLA and QoS requirements. We have validated the effectiveness of our proposed approach by conducting a performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. Competitive analysis of the experimental results demonstrates that the proposed approach significantly improves energy consumption while avoiding the inefficient VM migrations.