Task scheduling and virtual machine allocation policy in cloud computing environment

Cloud computing represents a novel computing model in the contemporary technology world. In a cloud system, the computing power of virtual machines (VMs) and network status can greatly affect the completion time of data intensive tasks. However, most of the current resource allocation policies focus only on network conditions and physical hosts. And the computing power of VMs is largely ignored. This paper proposes a comprehensive resource allocation policy which consists of a data intensive task scheduling algorithm that takes account of computing power of VMs and a VM allocation policy that considers bandwidth between storage nodes and hosts. The VM allocation policy includes VM placement and VM migration algorithms. Related simulations show that the proposed algorithms can greatly reduce the task completion time and keep good load balance of physical hosts at the same time.