Power-network aware VM migration heuristics for multi-tier web applications

Cloud computing has become an attractive and promising platform, offering on-demand resources for multi-tier web applications. However, an inappropriate and inefficient resource management practices may negatively affect the service level agreement (SLA) and the response time experienced by users, essentially for high load operating conditions. Furthermore, this may result in substantial amount of energy consumption in data centers, which consequently leads to a high operational cost. This paper proposes an effective power-network aware virtual machine (VM) migration heuristics to deal with high SLA violation (SLAV) and energy consumption. Our research consists of two parts. The first part introduces a network-aware VM migration algorithm. The algorithm considers steady-state traffic condition to minimize the negative effect of migration on other flows. The network gain (NG) is calculated for candidate VMs and the VM with the maximum NG is selected. The second part, extends the network-aware algorithm with energy-awareness capabilities. In addition to NG, power gain (PG) is calculated for each candidate VM and two lists are created for each congested link: NG list and PG list. The VM with the lowest sum of the rank is selected. An extensive simulation is done in CloudSim. The results show that the power-network aware algorithm can reduce the energy consumption without significant increase in SLAV. This research enables us to take a step further towards building low latency, energy-efficient and environment-friendly data centers running network intensive applications.