A green-aware optimization strategy for virtual machine migration in cloud data centers

Migrating Virtual Machines (VM) is a useful tool for managing computing resources, load balancing, reducing energy consumption and facilitating fault management in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a green energy-aware VM migration approach aiming to increase the use of green energy of the data center taking into account the characteristics of the VMs and the available resources of the data stores. In essence, we define an energy aware optimization problem in hybrid energy-powered data centers. The objective is to extend the existing Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) of the virtualization solution in order to integrate other environmental variables. The obtained results based on an experimental study carried out in the pedagogic data center of the IT department of our university have shown that the energy efficiency can be managed by reassigning VMs to the data-center hosts.