Enhancing Energy-Efficient and QoS Dynamic Virtual Machine Consolidation Method in Cloud Environment

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation techniques are a means to improve energy efficiency and the utilization of cloud data center resources. However, aggressive VM consolidation approaches lead to physical host over-utilization and generate massive undesired VM migrations, which cause degradation of the performance of both the hosts and the VM. Additionally, it has been a significant challenge to improve energy efficiency and resource utilization in the data center while delivering services with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). To address the problem, we propose an enhancing energy-efficient and QoS dynamic virtual machine consolidation (EQVC) method, which consists of four algorithms that correspond to different stages in VM consolidation. In this approach, we select redundant VMs from the hosts before they overload and migrate the VMs to other hosts to save energy and guarantee QoS requirements. We also introduce a host-model with adaptive reserved resources to prevent re-overload of hosts. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed method and algorithms, we experiment under different workload traces from a real system. The experimental results demonstrate that EQVC approach can significantly outperform other traditional methods regarding energy consumption, QoS guarantees, and the number of VM migrations.