CoolCloudSim: Integrating Cooling System Models in CloudSim

This paper addresses the problem of Data Centers (DCs) energy efficiency from a thermal perspective by extending the CloudSim framework to allow simulation and testing of thermal aware resource allocation policies aiming to minimize the cooling system energy consumption. The proposed framework, CoolCloudSim, can be used to develop and test new thermal aware Virtual Machine (VM) allocation strategies aiming to optimize the energy consumption of both cooling system and IT resources while meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The default CloudSim architecture is extended by adding classes which contain mathematical models of the thermal processes within the server room. Furthermore, four new VM allocation policies that consider the cooling system energy consumption are developed based on the thermal and cooling system models. Finally, experiments are run to evaluate various metrics on a set of default CloudSim allocation algorithms and the proposed allocation algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the default CloudSim allocation strategy, Power Aware Best-Fit Decreasing (PABFD), in terms of overall energy consumption and the number of VM migrations, and have on average better results than other existing allocation strategies.