A New Approach for Dynamic Virtual Machine Consolidation in Cloud Data Centers

Cloud computing environments have introduced a new model of computing by shifting the location of computing infrastructure to the Internet network to reduce the cost associated with the management of hardware and software resources. The Cloud model uses virtualization technology to effectively consolidate virtual machines (VMs) into physical machines (PMs) to improve the utilization of PMs. Studies however have shown that the average utilization of PMs in many Cloud data centers is still lower than expected. The Cloud model is expected to improve the existing level of utilization by employing new approaches of consolidation mechanisms. In this paper we propose a new approach for dynamic consolidation of VMs in order to maximize the utilization of PMs. This is achieved by a dynamic programing algorithm that selects the best VMs for migration from an overloaded PM, considering the migration overhead of a VM. Evaluation results demonstrate that our algorithms achieve good performance.