Energy Efficient Virtual Machine Consolidation Using Water Wave Optimization

With the unprecedented growth of Cloud Computing, data centers around the world have increased exponentially. The energy utilization in these data centers is becoming a concern, so the need for energy-efficient algorithms in the cloud has been on the top agenda for quite a while. Cloud providers use different energy management strategies to minimize energy utilization and to maximize ROI (Return On Investment) such as energy-efficient virtual machine (VM) placement. We have taken the problem for VM consolidation and worked on it for an energy-efficient algorithm. VM Consolidation uses live migrations of VMs during the execution of cloudlets so that underloaded physical servers can be switched off by transferring those VMs to other physical machines. VM consolidation in the cloud environment is a proven NP-hard problem. We have used Water Wave optimization (WWO) which is a meta-heuristic algorithm. Original WWO proposed for continuous space and so we have modified the parameters of the algorithm to apply for our problem of VM consolidation. Our approach produces a near-optimal solution using an objective function that minimizes energy consumption and increases the number of switched off servers.