Multi-Agent based Architecture for Dynamic VM Consolidation in Cloud Data Centers

: Fahimeh Farahnakian, Tapio Pahikkala, Pasi Liljeberg, Juha Plosila, Hannu Tenhunen

: Euromicro conference on software engineering and advanced applications

: 2014

: Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), 2014 40th EUROMICRO Conference on

: 111

: 118

: 8

: 978-1-4799-5794-1

: 1089-6503

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA.2014.56

As the scale of cloud data centers becomes larger

and larger, the energy consumption of data centers also grows

rapidly. Dynamic consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs)

presents a significant opportunity to save energy by turning off

idle or under-utilized Physical Machines (PMs) in data centers.

In this paper, we present a multi-agent based architecture for

performing dynamic VM consolidation task. The architecture

uses a local agent in each PM to decide when a PM becomes

overloaded using reinforcement learning approach. Moreover, a

global agent is proposed as a supervisor to dynamically optimize

the VM placement based on the local agents’ decisions. Therefore,

agents cooperate together to minimize the number of active PMs

according to the current resource requirements. Experimental

results on the real workload traces from more than a thousand

PlanetLab virtual machines show that the proposed architecture

can reduce the energy consumption and maintains the required

performance level in a large-scale data center.