Plug4Green: A flexible energy-aware VM manager to fit data centre particularities

To maintain an energy footprint as low as possible, data centres manage their VMs according to conventional and established rules. Each data centre is however made unique due to its hardware and workload specificities. This prevents the ad hoc design of current VM managers from taking these particularities into account to provide additional energy savings. In this paper, we present Plug4Green, an energy-aware VM placement algorithm that can be easily specialized and extended to fit the specificities of the data centres. Plug4Green computes the placement of the VMs and state of the servers depending on a large number of constraints, extracted automatically from SLAs. The flexibility of Plug4Green is achieved by allowing the constraints to be formulated independently from each other but also from the power models. This flexibility is validated through the implementation of 23 SLA constraints and 2 objectives aiming at reducing either the power consumption or the greenhouse gas emissions. On a heterogeneous test bed, Plug4Green specialization to fit the hardware and the workload specificities allowed to reduce the energy consumption and the gas emission by up to 33% and 34%, respectively. Finally, simulations showed that Plug4Green is capable of computing an improved placement for 7500 VMs running on 1500 servers within a minute.