Towards Heat-Recirculation-Aware Virtual Machine Placement in Data Centers

As customers take virtual machines (VMs) as their demands, high-efficient placement of VMs is required to reduce the energy consumption in data centers. Existing Virtual Machine placement (VMP) strategies can minimize energy consumption of data centers by optimizing resource allocation in terms of multiple physical resources (e.g., memory, bandwidth, CPU, etc.). However, these strategies ignore the role of heat recirculation in the data center, which can cause a huge energy waste in cooling. To address this problem, we propose a heat-recirculation-aware VMP strategy for reducing the energy consumption of data centers. This novel VMP strategy takes into account heat recirculation coupled with multiple physical resource allocation to reduce the energy consumption of data centers. We design a simulated annealing based algorithm called SABA to lower the energy consumption of data centers where multiple VMs are deployed. SABA remarkably cuts down the energy consumption of physical resources through two salient features. First, it obtains an approximation of the optimum with much fewer iterations than simulated annealing algorithm (SA). Second, it reduces the number of activated servers required for VM tasks. We quantitatively evaluate the performance of SABA in terms of algorithm efficiency, the number of activated servers and the energy-saving. We compare the performance of SABA with state-of-art XINT-GA, PPVMP, TSTD and SA algorithms. Moreover, we evaluate the efficiency of SABA by leveraging a real-world 50 hours trace from practical IBM cloud data centers. Experimental results indicate that our heat-recirculation-aware VM placement strategy provides a powerful solution for improving the energy efficiency of data centers (SABA improves energy efficiency of cooling by up to 13.2% over TSTD, 13.8% over XINT-GA and 45% over PPVMP algorithm).