VCAE: A Virtualization and Consolidation Analysis Engine for Large Scale Data Centers

Server consolidation through virtualization is becoming an effective way to save power and space in enterprise data centers. However, it also brings additional operational risks for the consolidated system because the impacts of hardware failures, human errors, and security breaches can be vastly magnified in that densely packed environment. In order to mitigate the above issues, this paper proposes a new virtualization and consolidation analysis engine(VCAE), which exploits and utilizes various constraints in the consolidation process. VCAE provides a comprehensive framework to discover, represent, check, and combine various constraints in server consolidation. It can assist system operators to effectively deal with the large number of constraints in the consolidation planning. In addition, VCAE proposes an evolution based method to discover the optimal consolidation scheme under multiple constraints. As a consequence, the consolidation solution generated by VCAE can not only maximize the utilization of system resources but also keep the hidden risks as low as possible in the consolidated system. The experimental results from an real enterprise system have demonstrated the advantages of our analysis engine.