A Systematic Literature Review on Virtual Machine Consolidation

Virtual machine consolidation has been a widely explored topic in recent years due to Cloud Data Centers’ effect on global energy consumption. Thus, academia and companies made efforts to achieve green computing, reducing energy consumption to minimize environmental impact. By consolidating Virtual Machines into a fewer number of Physical Machines, resource provisioning mechanisms can shutdown idle Physical Machines to reduce energy consumption and improve resource utilization. However, there is a tradeoff between reducing energy consumption while assuring the Quality of Service established on the Service Level Agreement. This work introduces a Systematic Literature Review of one year of advances in virtual machine consolidation. It provides a discussion on methods used in each step of the virtual machine consolidation, a classification of papers according to their contribution, and a quantitative and qualitative analysis of datasets, scenarios, and metrics.