Energy-efficient virtual machine provisioning mechanism in cloud computing environments

As the increasing number of modern applications and enterprises demand more and more resources in computational power, memory and disk storage, cloud data centers are consuming huge amounts of electrical energy. The aim of cloud service providers is to reduce the operational costs by minimizing energy consumption while providing competitive services to their customers. The above, can be fulfilled by trying to reduce the number of active servers, using live VM migrations and keeping the system performance in the requested levels according to SLAs. In this paper, an efficient virtual machine allocation mechanism for cloud data center environments is proposed. We first describe the virtual machine allocation policy and then we perform a series of experiments based on CloudSim [1] 3.0.3 simulator. Experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme is very efficient in terms of energy consumption and QoS (decreased SLA violations) compared to LrMmt provisioning mechanism presented in [2].