Energy-Aware Virtual Machine Consolidation in IaaS Cloud Computing

Abstract

With immense success and rapid growth within the last few years, cloud computing has been established as the dominant paradigm of IT industry. In order to meet the increasing demand of computing and storage resources, infra- structure cloud providers are deploying planet-scale data centers across the world, consisting of hundreds of thousands, even millions of servers. These data centers incur very high investment and operating costs for the compute and network de- vices as well as for the energy consumption. Moreover, because of the huge ener- gy usage, such data centers leave large carbon footprints and thus have adverse ef- fects on the environment. As a result, efficient computing resource utilization and energy consumption reduction are becoming crucial issues to make cloud compu- ting successful. Intelligent workload placement and relocation is one of the prima- ry means to address these issues. This chapter presents an overview of the infra- structure resource management systems and technologies, and detailed description of the proposed solution approaches for efficient cloud resource utilization and minimization of power consumption and resource wastages. Different types of server consolidation mechanisms are presented along with the solution approaches proposed by the researchers of both academia and industry. Various aspects of workload reconfiguration mechanisms and existing works on workload relocation techniques are described.