A Metaheuristic Framework for Dynamic Virtual Machine Allocation With Optimized Task Scheduling in Cloud Data Centers

Optimal allocation of virtual machines in a cloud computing environment for user-submitted tasks is a challenging task. Finding an optimal task scheduling solution is considered as NP-hard problem specifically for large task sizes in the cloud environment. The best solution involves scheduling the tasks to virtual machines data centre while minimizing the essential, influential and cost effective parameters such as energy usage, makespan and cost. In this direction, this work presents a metaheuristic framework called MDVMA for dynamic virtual machine allocation with optimized task scheduling in a cloud computing environment. The MDVMA focuses on developing a multi-objective scheduling method using non dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA)-II algorithm-based metaheuristic algorithm for optimizing task scheduling with the aim of minimizing energy usage, makespan and cost simultaneously to provide trade-off to the cloud service providers as per their requirements. To evaluate the performance of the MDVMA approach, we compared the performances of two different scenarios of benchmark real-world workload data sets using the existing approaches, namely, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that optimizing task scheduling leads to better overall results in terms of minimizing energy usage, makespan and cost of the cloud data center. Finally, the paper concludes metaheuristic algorithms as a promising method for task scheduling in a cloud computing environment.