A Holistic Energy-Aware and Probabilistic Determined VMP Strategy for Heterogeneous Data Centers

Hao Feng, Tianqin Zhou, Yuhui Deng, Laurence T. Yang

Abstract: The expansion of data centers, driven by the continuous development of network services, has led to a significant issue of high energy consumption. Due to the real-time interaction between IT and non-IT equipments, it is difficult to consider the holistic energy consumption of heterogeneous data centers. Therefore, this paper proposes a holistic-energy-aware-virtual machine placement (VMP) strategy for data centers that use heterogeneous resources to provide services. Firstly, we propose the energy-aware VMP strategy by using the probabilistically determining mechanism to effectively minimize the number of activated servers and improve server resource utilization. Secondly, within this strategy, we leverage dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technology, enabling nodes to operate at lower frequencies and voltages while meeting performance requirements, thus further reducing computing energy consumption. Thirdly, in addition to the previous two points, the probabilistic determined genetic algorithm (PDGA) is proposed to reasonably distribute the workloads based on the heat-recirculation effect and reduces the cooling energy consumption. The above mechanisms collectively optimize the global energy consumption of heterogeneous data centers. Experimental results demonstrate that the PDGA can significantly reduce the energy consumption of IT and non-IT equipment. The total energy consumption of the data center is significantly reduced (the PDGA is 20.83% lower than the simulated annealing based algorithm and 20.76% lower than the big data task scheduling algorithm based on thermal-aware and DVFS-enabled techniques).