Energy-Aware Virtual Machine Consolidation Algorithm Based on Ant Colony System

Energy consumption has become a critical issue for data centers due to energy-associated costs and environmental effects. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on Ant Colony System to solve Virtual Machine Consolidation problem aims to save the energy consumption of cloud data centers. We consider the energy consumption during VMs migration as one of the primary factors which have not considered in the similar conventional algorithms. It significantly reduces the number of migrations and the active physical machines that result in the reduction of total energy consumption of data centers. The simulation results on the random workload in different scenarios demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art VM Consolidation algorithm with regards to the number of migrations, number of sleeping PMs, number of SLA Violations, and energy consumption.