Energy efficient virtual machine consolidation under uncertain input parameters for Green Data Centers

Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of data centers and the Cloud is very important in order to lower CO_2 footprint and operational cost (OPEX) of a Cloud operator. To this extent, it becomes crucial to minimise the energy consumption by consolidating the number of powered-on physical servers that host the given virtual machines (VMs). In this work, we propose a novel approach to the energy efficient VM consolidation problem by applying Robust Optimisation Theory. We develop a mathematical model as a robust Mixed Integer Linear Program under the assumption that the input to the problem (e.g. resource demands of the VMs) is not known precisely, but varies within given bounds. A numerical evaluation shows that our model allows the Cloud Operator to tradeoff between the power consumption and the protection from more severe and unlikely deviations of the uncertain input.