Energy-Efficient and Performance-Aware Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Virtualized cloud data centers provide on-demand resources, enable agile resource provisioning, and host heterogeneous applications with different resource requirements. These data centers consume enormous amounts of energy, increasing operational expenses, inducing high thermal inside data centers, and raising carbon dioxide emissions. The increase in energy consumption can result from ineffective resource management that causes inefficient resource utilization.

This dissertation presents detailed models and novel techniques and algorithms for virtual resource management in cloud data centers. The proposed techniques take into account Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and workload heterogeneity in terms of memory access demand and communication patterns of web applications and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. To evaluate our proposed techniques, we use simulation and real workload traces of web applications and HPC applications and compare our techniques against the other recently proposed techniques using several performance metrics.

The major contributions of this dissertation are the following:

I. A proactive resource provisioning technique based on robust optimization to increase the hosts' availability for hosting new VMs while minimizing the idle energy consumption. Additionally, this technique mitigates undesirable changes in the power state of the hosts by which the hosts' reliability can be enhanced in avoiding failure during a power state change. The proposed technique exploits the range-based prediction algorithm for implementing robust optimization, taking into consideration the uncertainty of demand.

II. A robust VM consolidation for efficient energy and performance management to achieve equilibrium between energy and performance trade-offs. Our technique reduces the number of VM migrations compared to recently proposed techniques. This also contributes to a reduction in energy consumption by the network infrastructure.

III. Communication-aware and energy-efficient consolidation for parallel applications to enable the dynamic discovery of communication patterns and reschedule VMs using migration based on the determined communication patterns. A novel dynamic pattern discovery technique is implemented based on signal processing of network utilization of VMs instead of using the information from the hosts' virtual switches or initiation from VMs. The result shows that our proposed approach reduces the network's average utilization, achieves energy savings due to reducing the number of active switches, and provides better VM performance compared to CPU-based placement.   

IV. Memory-aware VM consolidation for independent VMs, which exploits the diversity of VMs' memory access to balance memory-bus utilization of hosts.
The proposed technique, Memory-bus Load Balancing (MLB), reactively redistributes VMs according to their utilization of a memory-bus using VM migration to improve the performance of the overall system.