Reliability‐aware server consolidation for balancing energy‐lifetime tradeoff in virtualized cloud datacenters

Abstract

SUMMARYServer consolidation using virtualization technologies allow large‐scale datacenters to improve resource utilization and energy efficiency. However, most existing consolidation strategies solely focused on balancing the tradeoff between performance service‐level‐agreements (SLAs) desired by cloud applications and energy costs consumed by hosting servers. With the presence of fluctuating workloads in datacenters, the lifetime and reliability of servers under dynamic power‐aware consolidation could be adversely impacted by repeated on–off thermal cycles, ware‐and‐tear and temperature rise. In this paper, we propose a Reliability‐Aware server Consolidation stratEgy, named RACE, to address when and how to perform energy‐efficient server consolidation in a reliability‐friendly and profitable way. The focus is on the characterization and analysis of this problem as a multi‐objective optimization, by developing a utility model that unifies multiple constraints on performance SLAs, reliability factors and energy costs in a holistic manner. An improved grouping genetic algorithm is proposed to search the global optimal solution, which takes advantage of a collection of reliability‐aware resource buffering and virtual machines‐to‐servers re‐mapping heuristics for generating good initial solutions and improving the convergence rate. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness, scalability and overhead of RACE—in improving the overall utility of datacenters while avoiding unprofitable consolidation in the long term—compared with pMapper and PADD strategies for server consolidation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Server consolidation techniques in virtualized data centers of cloud environments: A systematic literature review

“…However, utilizing maximum resources does not mean utilizing 100% of the recourses. In all researches, reaching a suitable trade‐off in utilizing various resources is intended …”

“…So that applying the consolidation algorithm is possible only at the end of the specified time intervals. Determining the appropriate time interval is effective in improving the performance of the consolidation technique . When time in the interval is very long, with workload changes and ignoring them for a long time, the probability of performance degradation increases.…”

“…The importance of this issue is more obvious when realizing that hardware problems are more probable to occur during the consolidation process. It is because due to the nature of consolidation process and frequent server switching from active to an inactive mode and vice versa, servers are more prone to malfunction …”

Measuring performance degradation of virtual machines based on the Bayesian network with hidden variables

“…Li et al 33 proposed a clustered virtual network abstraction strategy and a dynamical heapsort algorithm to find the most appropriate VMs while considering multiple VM performance constrains. Deng et al 37 used the multiobjective optimization model to address when and how to perform energy-efficient server consolidation in a reliability and profitable way. Meanwhile, some works included energy issues in the modeling process.…”

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Scheduling Methods of Virtual Machine Migration for Energy Conservation

“…E NERGY conservation has become an important issue for various data centers [1]. Nowadays, with the development of the cloud computing [2] and the utilization of the virtualization technology [3], the scale of data centers is increasing.…”