A biogeography-based optimization algorithm for energy efficient virtual machine placement

Recently, high levels of energy consumption in datacenters has become a concern not only due to operational costs, but also due to adverse effects on the environment (i.e., carbon emission, climate change, etc.) Virtualization technology can provide better management of physical servers/machines (PM) and may help reduce power consumption. The purpose of this study is to minimize the total energy consumption through good virtual machine (VM) placement. The VM placement problem has a large search space. Finding an optimal solution of such problems using an exhaustive search is impractical. Heuristic algorithms can provide high-quality solutions with limited computing resources in acceptable time. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) can be considered as heuristic tools that can provide high-quality solutions to this type of problems. We propose a Biogeography Based Optimization (BBO) Algorithm for energy-efficient VM placement. We compare the BBO results with the Genetic Algorithm (GA). Overall, simulation results show that BBO outperforms GA.