Virtual Machine Consolidation Techniques to Reduce Energy Consumption in Cloud Data Centers: A Survey

Abstract

Due to the growing demand for computational power, cloud computing is becoming one of the most attractive emerging technologies. It provides on-demand access to massive computing resources and services for the user through the data center. However, cloud data centers consume enormous electric energy to provide various services. Therefore, energy-efficient resource management in distributed cloud data centers is inevitable from economic and environmental perspectives. The challenge of delivering services with efficient resource utilization and low power consumption opens up a new direction. Virtual machine consolidation (VMC) is a powerful tool that ensures the provision of services without compromising QoS with a lesser active physical server. This paper presents a chronology of recent improvements through a systematic and comprehensive survey of existing VMC approaches and their implementation techniques, competitive algorithms, and performance metrices. Further, the performance of benchmark heuristics is evaluated on CloudSim.