Energy-efficient process replication by forcing meaningless replicas to terminate in virtual machine environment

Abstract

Server cluster systems equipped with virtual machines are widely used to provide various types of reliable application services. Especially, multiple replicas of each application process can be redundantly performed on multiple virtual machines to realize reliable application services. On the other hand, a large amount of electric energy is consumed in a server cluster since multiple replicas of each application process are performed on multiple virtual machines. In this paper, the improved redundant energy consumption laxity based (IRECLB) algorithm is newly proposed to reduce the total electric energy consumption of a server cluster for redundantly performing each application process by forcing meaningless replicas to terminate. We evaluate the IRECLB algorithm in terms of the total electric energy consumption of a server cluster and the average response time of each process compared with the redundant energy consumption laxity based (RECLB) algorithm previously proposed.