Virtual Machine Consolidation with Multi-Step Prediction and Affinity-Aware Technique for Energy-Efficient Cloud Data Centers

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an effective way to improve resource utilization and reduce energy consumption in cloud data centers. Most existing studies have considered VM consolidation as a bin-packing problem, but the current schemes commonly ignore the long-term relationship between VMs and hosts. In addition, there is a lack of long-term consid-eration for resource optimization in the VM consolidation, which results in unnecessary VM migration and increased energy consumption. To address these limitations, a VM consolidation method based on multi-step prediction and affinity-aware technique for energy-efficient cloud data centers (MPaAF-VMC) is proposed. The proposed method uses an improved linear regression prediction algorithm to predict the next-moment resource utilization of hosts and VMs, and obtains the stage demand of resources in the future period through multi-step prediction, which is realized by iterative prediction. Then, based on the multi-step prediction, an affinity model between the VM and host is designed using the first-order correlation coefficient and Euclidean distance. During the VM consolidation, the affinity value is used to select the migration VM and placement host. The proposed method is compared with the existing consolidation algorithms on the PlanetLab and Google cluster real workload data using the CloudSim simulation platform. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve significant improvement in reducing energy consumption, VM migration costs, and service level agree-ment (SLA) violations.

Automated summary

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an effective method to improve resource utilization and reduce energy consumption in cloud data centers. However, most existing studies ignore the long-term relationship between VMs and hosts, resulting in unnecessary VM migration and increased energy consumption. To address these limitations, a VM consolidation method based on multi-step prediction and affinity-aware technique is proposed.