OpenStack Neat: a framework for dynamic and energy-efficient consolidation of virtual machines in OpenStack clouds

Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is an efficient approach for improving the utilization of physical resources and reducing energy consumption in cloud data centers. Despite the large volume of research published on this topic, there are very few open-source software systems implementing dynamic VM consolidation. In this paper, we propose an architecture and open-source implementation of OpenStack Neat, a framework for dynamic VM consolidation in OpenStack clouds. OpenStack Neat can be configured to use custom VM consolidation algorithms and transparently integrates with existing OpenStack deployments without the necessity of modifying their configuration. In addition, to foster and encourage further research efforts in the area of dynamic VM consolidation, we propose a benchmark suite for evaluating and comparing dynamic VM consolidation algorithms. The proposed benchmark suite comprises OpenStack Neat as the base software framework, a set of real-world workload traces, performance metrics and evaluation methodology. As an application of the proposed benchmark suite, we conduct an experimental evaluation of OpenStack Neat and several dynamic VM consolidation algorithms on a five-node testbed, which shows significant benefits of dynamic VM consolidation resulting in up to 33% energy savings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.