A Holistic View of the Server Consolidation and Virtual Machines Placement Problems

Alongside the fourth industrial revolution and many other emerging technologies and markets, IT sectors are obligated to achieve a much higher level of efficiency in managing IT infrastructure through automation. Recent studies reported various statistical analysis that suggests tremendous growth in the energy consumption of data center operation. Accordingly, the CO
₂
emission footprint of data centers has reported a troubling increase in the past ten years, which is estimated to be the fastest growing CO
₂
footprint among different IT sectors. Therefore, in this research, we will present a holistic view of current technologies and solution strategies targeting sustainable virtual machines placement in virtualized data centers. Based on the presented literature analysis, we studied the advent and impact of virtualization strategies, the live migration algorithms, cloud computing model, and machine learning approaches on the management of data center for reducing energy consumption. Our findings suggest a steady increase in the complexity of the problem formulation with the advent of new technologies and a similar increase of the possible achievable optimization potential.