E2SVM: Electricity-Efficient SLA-aware Virtual Machine Consolidation approach in cloud data centers

Cloud data centers present a challenge to environmental sustainability because of their significant energy consumption. Additionally, performance degradation resulting from energy management solutions, such as virtual machine (VM) consolidation, impacts service level agreements (SLAs) between cloud service providers and users. Thus, to achieve a balance between efficient energy consumption and avoiding SLA violations, we propose a novel VM consolidation algorithm. Conventional algorithms result in unnecessary migrations when improperly selecting VMs. Therefore, our proposed E2SVM algorithm addresses this issue by selecting VMs with high load fluctuations and minimal resource usage from overloaded servers. These selected VMs are then placed on normally loaded servers, considering their stability index. Moreover, our approach prevents server underutilization by either applying all or no VM migrations. Simulation results demonstrate a 12.9% decrease in maximum energy consumption compared with the minimum migration time VM selection policy. In addition, a 47% reduction in SLA violations was observed when using the medium absolute deviation as the overload detection policy. Therefore, this approach holds promise for real-world data centers because it minimizes energy waste and maintains low SLA violations.