Energy-efficient Virtual Machine Provision Algorithms for Cloud Systems

Power consumption is one of the most critical problems in data centers. One effective way to reduce power consumption is to consolidate the hosting workloads and shut down physical machines which become idle after consolidation. Server consolidation is a NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose two new algorithms, Dynamic Round-Robin (DRR) and Hybrid, which combines DRR and First-Fit, for energy aware virtual machine scheduling and consolidation. We also propose an accurate power model to estimate the power consumption resulted from each algorithm. Strategies we proposed are compared with GREEDY, ROUNDROBIN and POWERSAVE scheduling strategies implemented in the Eucalyptus Cloud system. Our experiment results show that our DRR and Hybrid algorithms reduce power consumption by 56.4% and 55.9% respectively, compared with the ROUNDROBIN scheduling strategy in Eucalyptus. DDR and Hybrid also result in 3% less power consumption on average, compared with the POWERSAVE scheduling strategy in Eucalyptus.