Energy-Aware Virtual Machine Migration Models in a Scalable Cluster of Servers

In clusters of servers like cloud computing systems, computation resources like CPUs and storages are virtualized. Virtual machines are now widely used to support applications with virtual computation service on computation resources. Application processes are performed on virtual machines independently of which servers of which architectures are used. Furthermore, a virtual machine can migrate from a host server to a guest server while processes are being performed on the virtual machines. In this paper, we take advantage of the migration technologies of virtual machines to reduce the electric energy consumed by servers. We propose a modified simple virtual machine migration (MSVM) algorithm to migrate a virtual machine to another energy-efficient server in order to reduce the electric energy consumption. Here, the amount of computation to be performed by processes on a virtual machine is estimated only by using the number of the processes. We show the total electric energy consumption of the servers can be reduced in the MSVM algorithm compared with non-migration algorithms.