Virtual machine placement in cloud using artificial bee colony and imperialist competitive algorithm

Increasing resource efficiency and reducing energy consumption are significant challenges in cloud environments. Placing virtual machines is essential in improving cloud systems’ performance. This paper presents a hybrid method using the artificial bee colony and imperialist competitive algorithm to reduce provider costs and decrease client expenditure. Implementation of the proposed plan in the CloudSim simulation environment indicates the proposed method performs better than the Monarch butterfly optimization and salp swarm algorithms regarding energy consumption and resource usage. Moreover, average central processing unit (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM) usage and the number of host shutdowns show better results for the proposed model

An Ant Colony System for energy-efficient dynamic Virtual Machine Placement in data centers

Data centers are fundamental infrastructure for information technology and cloud services; however, their very high rates of energy consumption are a problem. The placement of Virtual Machines (VMs) to Physical Machines (PMs) in virtualized environments has a significant impact on the energy consumption of a data center. This is an NP-hard problem, for which an optimal solution is not practicable even for a small-scale data center. In this paper, we formulate placement of VMs to PMs in a data center as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and make use of the information from PM and VM profiles to minimize the total energy consumption of all active PMs. An Ant Colony System (ACS) embedded with new heuristics is presented for an energy-efficient solution to the optimization problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the ACS, simulation experiments are conducted on small-, medium- and large-scale data centers. The results from our ACS are compared with two existing ACS methods as well as the widely used First-Fit-Decreasing (FFD) algorithm. Our ACS is shown to outperform the two existing ACS methods and FFD in energy performance for all small-, medium- and large-scale test problems. Our ACS also exhibits good scalability with the increase in the problem size