Energy consumption reduction through efficient load adjusting of hosts in cloud computing

Energy consumption of cloud data centres has been increasing drastically in recent years. This has a negative impact on environmental sustainability. One solution to reduce the energy consumption of cloud systems is to maximise resource utilisation. Virtualisation is an essential technique to improve system utilisation. For obtaining load balancing, virtual machine migration is used. However, unnecessary migrations result in ineffective cloud systems. In this context, we propose a load-adjusting model aimed at reducing energy consumption by minimising VM migrations, while ensuring that power utilisation does not increase. Multiple aspects are considered while selecting and performing VM migrations. This method also aims to achieve load balancing across the host machines. Simulation results using the CloudSim toolkit showed that the proposed model reduced power consumption with minimum virtual machine migrations.