Joint virtual machine and network policy consolidation in cloud data centers

Correct implementation of network policies provides secure and high performance network environment for multi-tenant Cloud Data Center (DC), but at the same time, requires substantial effort for manual configuration. While it is reported that 78% of DC downtime is caused by misconfiguration, the dynamic policy configuration and user demands on server consolidation have amplified the challenge of correct implementation. In this paper, we propose joint virtual machine and network policy migrations — Two-way migration — to facilitate the simultaneous need of dynamic server consolidation and policy management. Extensive simulation analysis shows that the proposed Two-way migration can mitigate link utilization at the core and aggregation layers by 90% and 28% respectively while adhering strictly to the network policies.