SLA-Aware and Energy-Efficient VM Consolidation in Cloud Data Centers Using Robust Linear Regression Prediction Model

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation provides a promising approach to save energy and to improve resource utilization in data centers. However, the aggressive consolidation of virtual machines may lead to service-level agreements (SLA) violation, which is essential for data centers and their users. Therefore, it is very meaningful to strike a tradeoff between power efficient and reduction of SLA violation level. In this paper, we propose a host overloading/underloading detection algorithm and a new VM placement algorithm based on our proposed robust simple linear regression prediction model for SLA-aware and energy-efficient consolidation of virtual machines in cloud data centers. Different from the native linear regression, our proposed methods amend the prediction and squint toward over-prediction by adding the error to the prediction; in this paper, we propose eight methods to calculate the error. We evaluate our proposed algorithms by extended the CloudSim simulator using PlanetLab workload and random workload. The experimental results show that our proposed model can reduce SLA violation rates by at most 99.16% and energy consumption by at most 25.43% for the real-world workload.