Genetic-Based Virtual Machines Consolidation Strategy With Efficient Energy Consumption in Cloud Environment

In cloud computing environments, virtualization is used to share physical machine (PM) resources among multiple users by creating virtual machines (VMs). Running the PM consumes a large amount of energy. Additionally, the PM will be overloaded when the demand for resources exceeds the PM capacity. This overload on the PM leads to violations of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Dynamic VM consolidation techniques use live migration of VMs to optimize resource utilization and minimize energy consumption. However, excessive migration of VMs impacts negatively the application performance due to the incurred overhead at the runtime. This paper presents a modified genetic-based VM consolidation (MGVMC) strategy that aims to replace VMs in an online manner taking into account energy consumption, SLA violations, and the number of VM migrations. The MGVMC strategy utilizes the genetic algorithm to migrate VMs to the appropriate PM in a way that minimizes the number of over-utilized and under-utilized physical machines (PMs) as low as possible. The performance of the MGVMC strategy was evaluated using the CloudSim Plus framework with a large number of VMs and workload traces from the PlanetLab platform. The experimental results revealed that the MGVMC strategy achieved a significant improvement in energy consumption, SLA violations, and the number of VM migrations compared to other recent approaches. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the MGVMC strategy in optimizing VM consolidation in the cloud environment.