A utilization based genetic algorithm for virtual machine placement in cloud computing systems

Abstract

Due to increasing demand for cloud computing and related services, cloud providers need to come up with methods and mechanisms that increase performance, availability and reliability of datacenters and cloud computing systems. Server virtualization is a key component to achieve this, which enables sharing of resources of a physical machine among multiple virtual machines in a totally isolated manner. Optimizing virtualization has a very signi cant e ect on the overall performance of cloud computing systems. This requires e cient and effective placement of virtual machines into physical machines. Since this is an optimization problem that involves multiple constraints and objectives, we propose a method based on genetic algorithms to place virtual machines. By considering utilization of machines and node distances, our method aims at reducing resource waste, network load, and energy consumption at the same time. We compared our method with several other methods in terms of utilization achieved, networking bandwidth consumed, and energy costs incurred, using the publicly available CloudSim simulation platform. The results show that our approach provides improved performance compared to other similar approaches.