Server consolidation with migration control for virtualized data centers

Virtualization has become a key technology for simplifying service management and reducing energy costs in data centers. One of the challenges faced by data centers is to decide when, how, and which virtual machines (VMs) have to be consolidated into a single physical server. Server consolidation involves VM migration, which has a direct impact on service response time. Most of the existing solutions for server consolidation rely on eager migrations, which try to minimize the number of physical servers running VMs. These solutions generate unnecessary migrations due to unpredictable workloads that require VM resizing. This paper proposes an LP formulation and heuristics to control VM migration, which prioritize virtual machines with steady capacity. We performed experiments using TU-Berlin and Google data center workloads to compare our migration control strategy against existing eager-migration-based solutions. We observed that avoiding migration of VMs with steady capacity reduces the number of migrations with minimal penalty in the number of physical servers.