Virtual Resource Consolidation for Green Computing
Based on Virtual Cluster Live Migration
Xiaohui Wei, Yue Jin, Hongliang Li*, Xingwang Wang, Shoufeng Hu
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China
Email: weixh@jlu.edu.cn; yuejinjy@yahoo.com; lihongliang@jlu.edu.cn;
wangxw2109@mails.jlu.edu.cn; shoufenghu@foxmail.com
Abstract—Data centers hosting applications consume
huge amounts of energy. Flexible management of virtual
clusters is an effective way to reduce the overall power
consumption of data centers. In order to save energy we
focus on decreasing the total power-on time of physical
nodes in data centers and increasing the runtime efficien-
cy of physical nodes. For a specific physical node how
long it is power-on is determined by the job with longest
completion time. In this work, we formulate the problem
into maximizing the amount of data which is processed
by unit energy. A VC-based migration approach is pro-
posed, which exploits the completion time of parallel jobs
encapsulated by virtual clusters to guide virtual machines
migrations. Algorithm VCGM is designed to construct the
final mapping state which is energy-efficiency. In VCGM,
all virtual clusters are grouped by their remaining time
and every virtual cluster group is “compacted” into few
physical nodes one by one. Then we adopt the low-cost
perfect matching in the bipartite matching problem to
obtain a migration plan. Algorithms are simulated and
evaluated to verify the effectiveness of our energy effi-
ciency scheme.
Index Terms—Virtual cluster migration, resource consolidation,
green computing
I. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing has gained more and more attention
from industry and academic in recent years. It leverages
virtualization technology allowing customers to on-
demand provision resources based on a pay-as-you-go
utility model. Virtualization technologies have several
properties: encapsulation, isolation and hardware inde-
pendence, and so on. These properties make the way of
utilizing data centers’ computing resources in cloud
changed. Virtualization is the core technology of cloud
computing and views computing resources as a pool of
Manuscript received August 5, 2015; revised December 20, 2015.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China (NSFC) (Grant No.61170004), IBM Shared University
Research (SUR) project (3D514BF41421), Specialized Research Fund
for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (20130061110052), Key
Science and Technology Research Project of Science and Technology
Department of Jilin Province (20140204013GX), Special Fund for
Scientific Research in the Public Interest (SinoProbe09-01), and the
research supported by China Geological Survey project
(12120113006300).
*Corresponding author email: lihongliang@jlu.edu.cn.
doi:10.12720/jcm.v.n.p-p
unified resources, which reduces the complexity and
manageability of data centers.
Infrastructure providers maintain thousands of physical
computing nodes to meet the continuously increasing
requirement. Cloud computing brings convenience to
users and vendors, while we should not ignore the huge
energy consumption it brings too [1, 2]. The work [3]
estimates that a data center with 50,000 computing nodes
may consume more than one hundred million kwh/year
energy. This enormous energy consumption is equivalent
to the electricity consumption for a 100,000 population
urban in one year and it will generate heat and lead to
expensive cooling costs.
The reasons for this extremely high energy consump-
tion are: mass of computing resources, hardware power
inefficiency, and resources inefficient usage. Large num-
ber of underutilized servers has become a major problem
to cloud providers that needed to be figured out. As the
base power consumption is the dominant part of total
power consumption, no matter whether the node is busy
or idle the energy drawn by it is huge. How long a physi-
cal node is power-on depends on the job with longest
completion time. VM consolidation is an effective meth-
od to increase physical resources utilization and reduce
the power consumption. Live migration is a valid method
that migrate some VMs to other physical machines if
necessary for VM consolidation.
Virtual cluster (VC) [4, 5] is a group of VMs which are
used to complete a parallel job. Virtual cluster becomes
popular to run high performance computing workloads.
And its sub-tasks will run on several virtual machines.
The interaction operations between tasks are required for
synchronization. The parallel job is not completed until
all its tasks have been finished.
After a parallel job is assigned to a virtual cluster, the
required resources of physical nodes must be allocated to
all VMs belonging to this virtual cluster. The random
placement of VMs belonging to same virtual cluster may
cause some scattered resources fragment or some un-
derutilized physical nodes generated when the assigned
job finish. This is adverse to energy saving. At present,
the researches on virtual cluster mainly focus on its de-
ployment, but have little attention on its live migration.
Virtual cluster live migration concerns the overall compu-
ting environment’s migration. The impaction of migration
to parallel job performance should be considered.
Based on the mechanism Limevi [6] which supports
virtual cluster live migration in parallel computation of