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

Due to the increasing demand for cloud computing and related services, cloud providers need to come up with methods and mechanisms that increase the performance, availability and reliability of data centers and cloud systems. Server virtualization is a key component to achieve this, which enables sharing of resources of a single physical machine among multiple virtual machines in a totally isolated manner. Optimizing virtualization has a very significant effect on the overall performance of a cloud computing system. This requires efficient 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 into physical servers of a data center. By considering the utilization of machines and node distances, our method, called Utilization Based Genetic Algorithm (UBGA), aims at reducing resource waste, network load, and energy consumption at the same time. We compared our method against several other placement methods in terms of utilization achieved, networking bandwidth consumed, and energy costs incurred, using an open-source, publicly available CloudSim simulator. The results show that our method provides better performance compared to other placement approaches.