A Logic Programming Approach to VM Placement

Placing virtual machines so to minimize the number of used physical hosts is an utterly important problem in cloud computing and next-generation virtualized networks. This article proposes a declarative reasoning methodology, and its open-source prototype, including four heuristic strategies to tackle this problem. Our proposal is extensively assessed over real data from an industrial case study and compared to state-of-the-art approaches, both in terms of execution times and solution optimality. As a result, our declarative approach determines placements that are only 6% far from optimal, outperforming a state-of-the-art genetic algorithm in terms of execution times, and a first-fit search for optimality of found placements. Last, its pipelining with a mathematical programming solution improves execution times of the latter by one order of magnitude on average, compared to using a genetic algorithm as a primer.