Consolidation of virtual machines using simulated annealing algorithm

Virtual machine consolidation and scheduling influence directly the cloud cost and performance. They play an important role in cloud service granting helping to achieve execution efficiency, user Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance, utilization of resources, energy saving, and the increasing profit of cloud providers. In this paper the authors propose the Optimization using Simulated Annealing (OSA) algorithm to solve dynamic virtual machine consolidation problem. The virtual machine consolidation problem is presented as an extension of the bin-packing problem. The configuration of the system, the function for obtaining new configuration, the objective function for the optimization problem are determined for the proposed simulated annealing algorithm. The evaluation results show that using OSA algorithm the simulated data center consumes almost the same amount of energy as not optimized algorithm, but OSA algorithm allows to decrease SLA violation and to reserve some resources of physical machine in order to react on increasing random demands in the nearest future.