Design and Implementation of a Multi-objective Optimization Mechanism for Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Computing Data Center

Cloud computing is becoming a popular way of supplying and using computing resources. A cloud-computing data center is equipped with a large number of physical resources and must manage an even larger number of virtual machines (VMs). The center’s VM placement strategy affects the utilization of physical resources, and consequently, it influences operational costs. Our goal is to develop a multi-objective optimization mechanism for VM placement that satisfies various constraints and results in the lowest operational cost. The number of possible combinations of VMs and hosts can be extremely large. For the mechanism to be practical, the number of possible combinations must be reduced. We reduced computational overheads by classifying VM hosts into a relatively small number of equivalent sets. Simulation results show that expected operational costs can be significantly reduced by applying the proposed mechanism.