Energy-aware virtual machine placement based on a holistic thermal model for cloud data centers

Abstract

As energy-intensive infrastructures, data centers (DCs) have become a pressing challenge for managers due to their significant energy consumption and carbon emissions. Information technology (IT) and cooling systems contribute the most to energy consumption. Energy-aware virtual machine (VM) scheduling methods have been widely demonstrated to reduce energy consumption and operating costs in DCs. However, as realistic DCs exhibit complex power and thermodynamic behaviors, existing works cannot provide efficient measures to optimize computing and cooling power consumption simultaneously. To overcome this challenge, we construct a holistic thermal model (including CPU and server inlet thermal models) to accurately represent the non-uniform, dynamic thermal environment. Subsequently, this work proposes a thermal model-based energy-aware VM placement method (TEVP) to minimize the holistic energy consumption of the DCs, considering resource and thermal constraints. We develop a novel hybrid swarm intelligence algorithm (DE-ERPSO) combining differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization with an elite re-selection mechanism (ERPSO) to explore more energy-efficient VM placement schemes. Extensive experiments are conducted on an extended CloudSim to validate the performance of the proposed TEVP using real-world workload traces (PlanetLab and Azure). Results show that TEVP saves over 5.6% of the total energy consumption over the advanced baselines while maintaining low thermal violations.