Energy-efficient scheduling for tasks with deadline in virtualized environments

Abstract

Data centers, as resource providers, take advantage of virtualization technology to achieve excellent resource utilization, scalability, and high availability. However, large numbers of computing servers containing virtual machines of data centers consume a tremendous amount of energy. Thus, it is necessary to significantly improve resource utilization. Among the many issues associated with energy, scheduling plays a very important role in successful task execution and energy consumption in virtualized environments. This paper seeks to implement an energy-efficient task scheduling algorithm for virtual machines with changeless speed comprised of two main steps: assigning as many tasks as possible to virtual machines with lower energy consumption and keeping the makespan of each virtual machine within a deadline. We propose a novel scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous virtual machines in virtualized environments to effectively reduce energy consumption and finish all tasks before a deadline. The new scheduling strategy is simulated using the CloudSim toolkit package. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms previous scheduling methods by a significant margin in terms of energy consumption.