AN INVESTIGATION OF VIRTUAL MACHINE ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND CONSOLIDATION TECHNIQUES IN IAAS CLOUD

Abstract

Cloud computing is a network based, on demand access model to a pool of configurable computing resources. These resources include servers, storage, networks,applications and services. One of the major services provided through cloud computing is called IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), where the access of infrastructure components such as storage, CPU, memory, and other devices is provided through internet. Cloud based services and web applications accessing them are rapidly growing as they promise high performance and uninterrupted services. This growth has posed a great demand of virtualized cloud data center establishments around the world. Typically, the power requirements of these data centers are huge, which leads to high operational cost as well as environmental issues. Accordingly, cloud providers started considering energy efficiency and consumption as a deciding factor for virtual machine (VM) placements. In its lifetime, a VM puts variable resource demand on physical host machine, and thus the initial placement of VM is not always a deciding parameter.In the present study, a thorough investigation has been carried out in virtual machine placement techniques in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based cloud offering.