Towards a green cluster through dynamic remapping of virtual machines

Since power is one of the major limiting factors for a data center or for large cluster growth, the objective of this study is to minimize the power consumption of the cluster without violating the performance constraints of the applications. We propose a runtime virtual machine (VM) mapping framework in a cluster or data center to save energy. The new framework can make reconfiguration decisions on time with the consideration of a low influence on the performance. In the GreenMap framework, one probabilistic, heuristic algorithm is designed for the optimization problem: mapping VMs onto a set of physical machines (PMs) under the constraint of multi-dimensional resource consumptions. Experimental measurements show that the new method can reduce the power consumption by up to 69.2% over base, with few performance penalties. The effectiveness and performance insights are also analytically verified.

► Remapping multi-VMs of clusters can save energy.
► GreenMap can reduce power consumption by 69.2%.
► Job blocking problems can be solved by GreenMap.