Migration-aware virtual machine placement for cloud data centers

In this paper, we consider virtual machine (VM) placement problem for cloud data centers. Different from previous works, the VMs considered need to be conducted within a finite duration. However, due to the limited resource at physical machines (PMs), the VM may be unable to place on a single PM within duration. To make sure the successful placement, the VM may undergo several PMs for service, e.g., it is run on one PM at this time, while migrated to another PM next time. Migrating the VM from one PM to another incurs extra cost, e.g., the bandwidth. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem, which maximizes the revenue of successfully placing the VMs, and minimizes the total number of migrations for the VMs. We prove it is NP-hard, and show that the minimum number of migrations for each VM under the resource constraint of PMs is equivalent to finding a shortest path problem. We then design a heuristic algorithm, which considers both the revenue and the minimum number of migrations required for the VM. We also design a 1 over 2-approximation algorithm for a special case of the problem. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through simulations.