Optimizing VM allocation and data placement for data-intensive applications in cloud using ACO metaheuristic algorithm

Nowadays data-intensive applications for processing big data are being hosted in the cloud. Since the cloud environment provides virtualized resources for computation, and data-intensive applications require communication between the computing nodes, the placement of Virtual Machines (VMs) and location of data affect the overall computation time. Majority of the research work reported in the current literature consider the selection of physical nodes for placing data and VMs as independent problems. This paper proposes an approach which considers VM placement and data placement hand in hand. The primary objective is to reduce cross network traffic and bandwidth usage, by placing required number of VMs and data in Physical Machines (PMs) which are physically closer. The VM and data placement problem (referred as MinDistVMDataPlacement problem) is defined in this paper and has been proved to be NP- Hard. This paper presents and evaluates a metaheuristic algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which selects a set of adjacent PMs for placing data and VMs. Data is distributed in the physical storage devices of the selected PMs. According to the processing capacity of each PM, a set of VMs are placed on these PMs to process data stored in them. We use simulation to evaluate our algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm selects PMs in close proximity and the jobs executed in the VMs allocated by the proposed scheme outperforms other allocation schemes.