Power-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement and Migration in Data Centers

In this paper, we propose a power-efficient solution for virtual machine placement and migration in a fat tree data center network. This solution reduces power consumption as well as job delay by aggregating virtual machines to a few hyper visors and migrating communicating parties to close locations. In this work, we consider OpenFlow as the implementation protocol. In an OpenFlow environment, a centralized controller oversees job loads, virtual machine requirements and hardware availability. Given observation of such global knowledge, the OpenFlow controller can schedule jobs and distribute virtual machines accordingly. As jobs change and flows shift, the OpenFlow controller dynamically adjusts virtual machine assignments by aggregating virtual machines to close locations in order to save energy. With this placement and migration proposal, more jobs can operate concurrently with close sources and destinations of flows, thus both job and flow delay can be reduced.