Loads prediction and consolidation of virtual machines in cloud

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is to assign a set of VMs requested by operators to the physical machines (PMs) in the data centers so that certain cost, profit or performance objective is optimized, subject to the PMs resource capacity constraints. It is an important mean to decrease the total power consumption by reducing the number of active physical machines (PM) in a cloud. In this context, most of the existing solutions rely on highly frequent live migration to reduce the number of active physical machines. However, live migration is a high resource consumption and time-consuming operation, thus, frequent use of live migration not only increases energy consumption but also affects the stability of the physical machine, which in turn affects the services on the virtual machine. Reducing the number of active physical machines while reducing the number of live migrations is a major challenge in the face of massive fluctuating virtual machine loads. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, we present a VM consolidation algorithm for predictable loads (VCPL) to reduce the live migration operations. First, we present a cyclic usage prediction (CUP) method to predict the load in a whole cycle (a day) of a VM. Then, we separate the VMs with stable and cyclic load out from others and consolidate them to PMs by using VCPL to make sure each PM has a stable load. Thus, energy can be reduced by avoiding most of live migration operations, and the stability of the data center can be observably improved. We evaluate our solution through simulations on real-world workloads, the results show that, 66% of long-term VMs have stable and cyclic loads and are predictable, by using VCPL, the live migration operations occurring on the PMs which accommodate those VMs can be reduced significantly than other solutions.

Automated summary

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is the assignment of requested VMs to physical machines (PMs) in order to optimize certain objectives while considering resource constraints. Most existing solutions rely on frequent live migration, which consumes resources and time. To address this, this paper proposes a VM consolidation algorithm for predictable loads (VCPL) to reduce live migration operations. The algorithm predicts load using a cyclic usage prediction (CUP) method, separates VMs with stable and cyclic load, and consolidates them to PMs. Simulations show that VCPL significantly reduces live migration operations.