An Energy-Efficient Load Balancing Algorithm for Virtual Machine Environments to Perform Communication Type Application Processes

Scalable, high performance, and fault-tolerant distributed applications are realized with virtual machines in server cluster systems. Application processes are performed on virtual machines in each server. Processing load of virtual machines to perform application processes has to be balanced in a server cluster system to satisfy the application requirements like response time. On the other hand, a server cluster system consumes a large amount of electric energy since multiple servers consume electric energy to perform application processes. It is critical to discuss how to reduce the total electric energy consumption of a server cluster to perform application processes on virtual machines. In our previous studies, the transmission model and power consumption model of a server to perform communication processes on multiple virtual machines are proposed. In this paper, we newly propose the transmission energy consumption laxity based (TECLB) algorithm to allocate communication processes to virtual machines in a server cluster based on the proposed transmission model and power consumption model of a server so that the total energy consumption of a server cluster can be reduced. We evaluate the TECLB algorithm in terms of the total energy consumption of a server cluster and transmission time of each process compared with the basic round-robin (RR) algorithm. The evaluation results show the average total energy consumption of a server cluster is maximumly reduced to 9% of the RR algorithm.