A Joint Power Efficient Server and Network Consolidation approach for virtualized data centers

Cloud computing and virtualization are enabling technologies for designing energy-aware resource management mechanisms in virtualized data centers. Indeed, one of the main challenges of big data centers is to decrease the power consumption, both to cut costs and to reduce the environmental impact. To this extent, Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation is often used to smartly reallocate the VMs with the objective of reducing the power consumption, by exploiting the VM live migration. The consolidation problem consists in finding the set of migrations that allow to keep turned on the minimum number of servers needed to host all the VMs. However, most of the proposed consolidation approaches do not consider the network related consumption, which represents about 10-20% of the total energy consumed by IT equipment in real data centers. This paper proposes a novel joint server and network consolidation model that takes into account the power efficiency of both the switches forwarding the traffic and the servers hosting the VMs. It powers down switch ports and routes traffic along the most energy efficient path towards the least energy consuming server under QoS constraints. Since the model is complex, a fast Simulated Annealing based Resource Consolidation algorithm (SARC) is proposed. Our numerical results demonstrate that our approach is able to save on average 50% of the network related power consumption compared to a network unaware consolidation.