A Heat-Recirculation-Aware VM Placement Strategy for Data Centers

Abstract

Data centers consisted of a great number of IT devices (e.g., servers, switches and etc.) which generates a massive amount of heat emission. Due to the special arrangement of racks in the data center, heat-recirculation often occurs between nodes. It can cause a sharp rise in temperature of the equipment coupled with local hot spots in data centers. Existing VM placement strategies can minimize energy consumption of data centers by optimizing resource allocation in terms of multiple physical resources (e.g., memory, bandwidth, cpu and etc.). However, existing strategies ignore the role of heat-recirculation in the data center. To address this problem, in this study, we propose a heat-recirculation-aware VM placement strategy and design a Simulated Annealing Based Algorithm (SABA) to lower the energy consumption of data centers. Different from the existing SA algorithm, SABA optimize the distribution of the initial solution and the way of iteration. We quantitatively evaluate SABA’s performance in terms of algorithm efficiency, the activated servers and the energy saving against with XINT-GA algorithm (Thermal-aware task scheduling Strategy), FCFS (First-Come First-Served), and SA. Experimental results indicate that our heat-recirculation-aware VM placement strategy provides a powerful solution for improving energy efficiency of data centers.