Towards Solving the Problem of Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Computing: A Job Classification Approach

Cloud Computing is a paradigm that delivers services by providing an access to wide range of shared resources which are hosted in cloud data centers. One of the recent challenges in this paradigm is to enhance the energy efficiency in these data centers. In this study, a model that identifies common patterns for the jobs submitted to the cloud is proposed. This model is able to predict the type of the job submitted and accordingly, the set of users’ jobs is classified into four subsets. Each subset contains jobs that have similar requirements. In addition to the jobs’ common pattern and requirements, the users’ history is considered in the jobs’ type prediction model. The goal of job classification is to find a way to propose useful strategy that helps to improve power efficiency. Based on the process of jobs’ classification, the best fit virtual machine is allocated to each job. Then, the virtual machines are placed on the physical machines according to a novel strategy, called Mixed Type Placement strategy. The core idea of the proposed strategy is to place virtual machines of the jobs of different types in the same physical machine whenever possible. The placement process is based on Multi Choice Knapsack Problem which is a generalization of the classical Knapsack Problem. This is because different types of jobs do not intensively use the same compute or storage resources in the physical machine. This strategy minimizes the number of active physical machines which, in turn, leads to major reduction in the total energy consumption in the data center. The total execution time and the cost of executing the jobs submitted are considered in the placement process. To evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy, the CloudSim simulator is used with a real workload trace to simulate the cloud computing environment. The results show that the proposed strategy outperform both Genetic Algorithm and Round Robin from energy efficiency perspective.