Consolidation of virtual machines to reduce energy consumption of data centers by using ballooning, sharing and swapping mechanisms

Abstract

Data centers have major environmental impacts due to their energy consumption and the manufacturing of equipment. They emit greenhouse gases and consume energy and resources, such as rare earth and water. Efficient computing resource management is therefore a key challenge for Cloud service providers today as they need to meet a growing demand while limiting the oversizing of their infrastructures. Mechanisms derived from virtualization, such as Virtual Machines (VMs) consolidation, are used to optimize resource management and infrastructure sizing, but economic and technical constraints can hinder their adoption. They require prior infrastructure knowledge and usage study to evaluate their potential, involve complex placement algorithms, and are sometimes difficult to implement in hypervisors. In this paper, we propose ORCA (OuR Consolidation Algorithm), a complete consolidation methodology designed to facilitate the production implementation of such mechanisms. This methodology includes the study of VM usage, the use of prediction models, and a VM placement algorithm that takes advantage of resource oversubscription. The choice of relevant oversubscription ratios is also addressed, with a focus on memory overcommitment through the study of memory overcommitment mechanisms:ballooning, page sharing, and swapping. Results from a detailed simulation process and deployment on a production infrastructure are presented. The methodology is tested in simulation on two production infrastructure datasets, with power consumption reduction as high as 29.8% and without consolidation error. The production deployment using VMWare vSphere and considering fault tolerance requirements reduces the energy consumption by 6.12% without causing any performance degradation.