Joint admission control and provisioning for virtual machines

In current data centers, cloud providers (CPs) need to make decisions on virtual machine (VM) deployment requests that arrive dynamically over time under the constraint of limited physical resources to host VMs. Existing schemes to solve this problem either do not consider the dynamic characteristic of requests when solving the VM provisioning problem or separate admission control and VM provisioning into two independent problems. Both approaches can result in substantially sub-optimal revenue outcomes. In this paper, we propose a joint admission control and VM provisioning scheme based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework to optimize the VM admission and placement decision in an integrated manner to maximize the CP´s operating revenue. Because of the large number of physical servers in data centers, the MDP problem is computationally intractable to standard dynamic programming techniques. We propose a simulation-based approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm to effectively solve the problem. Simulation results show that the new joint admission control and VM provisioning algorithm can substantially increase the revenue generated for CPs.