I-Neat: An intelligent framework for adaptive virtual machine consolidation

With the increasing use of cloud computing, high energy consumption has become one of the major challenges in cloud data centers. Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation has been proven to be an efficient way to optimize energy consumption in data centers, and many research works have proposed to optimize VM consolidation. However, the performance of different algorithms is related with the characteristics of the workload and system status; some algorithms are suitable for Central Processing Unit (CPU)-intensive workload and some for web application workload. Therefore, an adaptive VM consolidation framework is necessary to fully explore the potential of these algorithms. Neat is an open-source dynamic VM consolidation framework, which is well integrated into OpenStack. However, it cannot conduct dynamic algorithm scheduling, and VM consolidation algorithms in Neat are few and basic, which results in low performance for energy saving and Service-Level Agreement (SLA) avoidance. In this paper, an Intelligent Neat framework (I-Neat) is proposed, which adds an intelligent scheduler using reinforcement learning and a framework manager to improve the usability of the system. The scheduler can select appropriate algorithms for the local manager from an algorithm library with many load detection algorithms. The algorithm library is designed based on a template, and in addition to the algorithms of Neat, I-Neat adds six new algorithms to the algorithm library. Furthermore, the framework manager helps users add self-defined algorithms to I-Neat without modifying the source code. Our experimental results indicate that the intelligent scheduler and these novel algorithms can effectively reduce energy consumption with SLA assurance.