Virtual machine placement optimizing to improve network performance in cloud data centers

With the wide application of virtualization technology in cloud data centers, how to effectively place virtual machine (VM) is becoming a major issue for cloud providers. The existing virtual machine placement (VMP) solutions are mainly to optimize server resources. However, they pay little consideration on network resources optimization, and they do not concern the impact of the network topology and the current network traffic. A multi-resource constraints VMP scheme is proposed. Firstly, the authors attempt to reduce the total communication traffic in the data center network, which is abstracted as a quadratic assignment problem; and then aim at optimizing network maximum link utilization (MLU). On the condition of slight variation of the total traffic, minimizing MLU can balance network traffic distribution and reduce network congestion hotspots, a classic combinatorial optimization problem as well as NP-hard problem. Ant colony optimization and 2-opt local search are combined to solve the problem. Simulation shows that MLU is decreased by 20%, and the number of hot links is decreased by 37%.