Energy Efficient Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Data Centers Using Modified Intelligent Water Drop Algorithm

Cloud Computing is an emerging distributed computing paradigm for the dynamic provisioning of computing services on demand over the internet. Due to heavy demand of various IT services over the cloud, energy consumption by data centers is growing significantly worldwide. The intense use of data centers leads to high energy consumptions, excessive CO₂ emission and increase in the operating cost of the data centers. Although many virtual machine (VM) placement approaches have been proposed to improve the resource utilization and energy efficiency, most of these works assume a homogeneous environment in the data centers. However, the physical server configurations in heterogeneous data centers lead to varying energy consumption characteristics. In this paper, we model and implement a modified Intelligent Water Drop algorithm (MIWD) algorithm for dynamic provisioning of virtual machines on hosts in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments such that total energy consumption of a data center in cloud computing environment can be minimized. Experimental results indicate that our proposed MIWD algorithm is giving superior results.