Power consumption-aware virtual machine allocation in cloud data center

This paper compares a set of Virtual Machine (VM) allocators for Cloud Data Centers (DCs) that perform the joint allocation of computing and network resources. VM requests are defined in terms of system (CPU, RAM and Disk) and network (Bandwidth) resources. As concerns the first ones, we allocate VM resources following two different policies, namely Best Fit and Worst Fit, corresponding to consolidation and spreading strategies respectively. For each server, the allocators choose the network path that minimizes electrical power consumption, evaluated according to a precise model, specifically designed for network switches. More specifically, we implemented different allocation algorithms based on Fuzzy Logic, Single and Multi-Objective optimization. Simulation tests have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the allocators in terms of number of allocated VMs for each policy. Finally, it is worth mentioning that we have designed the proposed allocators as a building block of a Software Defined Networking (SDN) orchestrator.