PERMUTE: Response Time and Energy Aware Virtual Machine Placement for Cloud Data Centers

Cloud data centers play a significant role in providing services needed by users in a quick way. Recent studies show that, traffic patterns in data centers have a special importance to be improved, since they have significant effects on various aspects such as congestion, overall energy consumption and service response time. The traffic patterns inside a cloud data center have two categories: North-South and East-West. The former one is the outside-inside and inside-outside traffic, Whereas, the latter is the traffic among Virtual Machines (VMs) within data centers. Previous studies have shown that the East-West traffic pattern is multiple times larger than the North-South one. This leads data centers to experience congestion and packet loss in the core layer of their topology. Common cause of large traffic patterns is that, VMs of service chains are scattered within the data center in different racks, so that, it causes lots of packet injection into the data center. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm to place VMs of a service chain in a closer proximity of each other to improve the East-West traffic pattern by reducing response time of services and also data centers’ overall energy consumption. The simulation results compared to the state-of-the-art method demonstrate about 18% improvement in response time for users’ requests and 10% of total energy consumption reduction in the data center.