High energy cost is a big challenge faced by the current data centers, wherein computing energy and cooling energy are main contributors to such cost. Consolidating workload onto fewer servers decreases the computing energy. However, it may result in thermal hotspots which typically consume greater cooling energy. Thus the tradeoff between computing energy decreasing and cooling energy decreasing is necessary for energy saving. In this paper, we propose a minimized-total-energy virtual machine (VM for short) migration model called C2vmMap based on efficient tradeoff between computing and cooling energies, with respect to two relationships: one for between the resource utilization and computing power and the other for among the resource utilization, the inlet and outlet temperatures of servers, and the cooling power. Regarding online resolution of the above model for better scalability, we propose a VM migration algorithm called C2vmMap_heur to decrease the total energy of a data center at run-time. We evaluate C2vmMap_heur under various workload scenarios. The real server experimental results show that C2vmMap_heur reduces up to 40.43% energy compared with the non-migration load balance algorithm. This algorithm saves up to 3x energy compared with the existing VM migration algorithm.

With the growth of cloud-based services, cloud data centers are experiencing large growth. A key component in a cloud data center is the network technology deployed. In particular, Ethernet technology, commonly deployed in cloud data centers, is already envisioned for 10 Tbps Ethernet. In this paper, we study and analyze the makespan, workload execution times, and virtual machine migrations as the network speed increases. In particular, we consider homogeneous and heterogeneous data centers, virtual machine scheduling algorithms, and workload scheduling algorithms. Results obtained from our study indicate that the increase in a network's speed reduces makespan and workloads execution times, while aiding in the increase of the number of virtual machine migrations. We further observed that the number of migrations' behaviors in relation to the speed of the networks also depends on the employed virtual machines scheduling algorithm.

This paper proposes a new optimization problem and several implementation algorithms for energy-efficient clouds where energy efficiency is measured by the number of physical machines that can be removed from operation and turned off. The optimization problem is formulated is such a way that solutions are considered favorable not only when the number of migrations is minimized but also when the resulting layout has more free physical machines which can therefore be turned off to save electricity.

A virtual machine (VM) migration is useful for improving flexibility and maintainability in cloud computing environments. However, VM monitor (VMM)-bypass I/O technologies, including PCI passthrough and SR-IOV, in which the overhead of I/O virtualization can be significantly reduced, make VM migration impossible. This paper proposes a novel and practical mechanism, called Symbiotic Virtualization (SymVirt), for enabling migration and checkpoint/restart on a virtualized cluster with VMM-bypass I/O devices, without the virtualization overhead during normal operations. SymVirt allows a VMM to cooperate with a message passing layer on the guest OS, then it realizes VM-level migration and checkpoint/restart by using a combination of a user-level dynamic device configuration and coordination of distributed VMMs. We have implemented the proposed mechanism on top of QEMU/KVM and the Open MPI system. All PCI devices, including Infiniband, Ethernet, and Myrinet, are supported without implementing specific para-virtualized drivers; and it is not necessary to modify either of the MPI runtime and applications. Using the proposed mechanism, we demonstrate reactive and proactive FT mechanisms on a virtualized Infiniband cluster. We have confirmed the effectiveness using both a memory intensive micro benchmark and the NAS parallel benchmark.