Failure-aware energy-efficient VM consolidation in cloud computing systems.

VM consolidation is an important technique used in cloud computing systems to improve energy efficiency. It migrates the running VMs from under utilized physical resources to other resources in order to reduce the energy consumption. But in a cloud computing environment with failure prone resources, focusing solely on energy efficiency has adverse effects. If the reliability factor of resources is ignored then the running VMs may get consolidated to unreliable physical resources. This will cause more failures and recreations of VMs, thus increasing the energy consumption. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a failure-aware VM consolidation mechanism, which takes the occurrence of failures and the hazard rate of physical resources into consideration before performing VM consolidation. We proposed a failure prediction technique based on exponential smoothing to trigger two fault tolerance mechanisms (VM migration and VM checkpointing). A simulation based evaluation of the proposed VM consolidation mechanism was conducted by using real failure traces. The results demonstrate that by using the combination of checkpointing and VM migration with the proposed failure-aware VM consolidation mechanism, the energy consumption of cloud computing system is reduced by 34% and reliability is improved by 12% while decreasing the occurrence of failures by 14%.