Effective VM sizing in virtualized data centers

In this paper, we undertake the problem of server consolidation in virtualized data centers from the perspective of approximation algorithms. We formulate server consolidation as a stochastic bin packing problem, where the server capacity and an allowed server overflow probability p are given, and the objective is to assign VMs to as few physical servers as possible, and the probability that the aggregated load of a physical server exceeds the server capacity is at most p.