A Survey of Virtual Machine Placement Techniques in a Cloud Data Center

Energy consumption of massive-scale cloud data centers is increasing unacceptably. There is a need to improve the energy efficiency of such data centers using Server Consolidation which aims at minimizing the number of Active Physical Machines (APMs) in a data center. Effective VM placement and migration techniques act as a key to optimum consolidation. Many of the recently proposed techniques realize dynamic consolidation while optimizing the VM placement. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the state-of-the-art VM placement and consolidation techniques used in green cloud which focus on improving the energy efficiency. A detailed comparison is presented, revealing pitfalls and suggesting improvisation methods along this direction.