Dynamic migration of virtual machines to reduce energy consumption in a cluster

Virtual machines are widely used to support applications with virtual service in server clusters. Here, a virtual machine can migrate from a host server to a guest server. In this paper, we consider a cluster where virtual machines are dynamically created and dropped depending on the number of processes. We propose a dynamic virtual machine migration (DVMM) algorithm to reduce the total electric energy consumption of servers. If an application issues a process to a cluster, the most energy-efficient host server is first selected and then the process is performed on a virtual machine of the server. Then, a virtual machine migrates from a host server to a guest server so that total electric energy consumption of servers can be reduced. In the evaluation, we show the total electric energy consumption and active time of servers and the average execution time of processes can be reduced in the DVMM algorithm.