A Workload-Aware VM Consolidation Method Based on Coalitional Game for Energy-Saving in Cloud

Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation technique plays an important role in energy management and load-balancing of cloud computing systems. Dynamic VM consolidation is a promising consolidation approach in this direction, which aims at using least active physical machines (PMs) through appropriately migrating VMs to reduce resource consumption. The resulting optimization problem is well-acknowledged to be NP-hard optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a novel merge-and-split-based coalitional game-theoretic approach for VM consolidation in heterogeneous clouds. The proposed approach first partitions PMs into different groups based on their workload levels, then employs a coalitional-game-based VM consolidation algorithm (CGMS) in choosing members from such groups to form effective coalitions, performs VM migrations among the coalition members to maximize the payoff of every coalition, and finally keeps PMs running in a high energy-efficiency state. The simulation results based on three scenarios clearly suggest that our proposed approach outperforms traditional ones in terms of energy-saving, and also achieve a fair level of load balance.