Reducing network cost of minimal-migration based VM management in cloud datacenters

Nowadays, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) provide flexible architectures and reliable internet accessories in cloud datacenters, where different types of applications are hosted. In order to achieve higher resource utilization and better quality of service, virtualization is widely used and implemented with virtual machines (VMs). However, most studies focus on VM management for utilization and energy, not yet considering the cost for emerging internet applications. Therefore, to further reduce network cost, we propose utilization-and-network-driven (UND) and only-network-driven (OND) strategies on top of the common minimal-migration (MM) based VM management as UND-MM and OND-MM. According to simulation results, both UND-MM and OND-MM strategies effectively reduce network cost by averagely 7% and 37%, respectively, of the original MM while retaining comparable resource utilization in CPU and memory for normally-loaded and overloaded datacenters. Moreover, the OND-MM, which is simpler, outperforms the UND-MM, and thus becomes more preferable for VM management in cloud datacenters.