Efficient Server Consolidation Considering Intra-Cluster Traffic

Due to the advancement of virtual machine technologies, large server farms or data centers consolidate their servers into a set of more powerful machines to increase the flexibility, agility, and adaptability to the fluctuating resource demands. Furthermore, managing a small number of powerful machines rather than a large number of low-performing machines decreases the management costs. In such a consolidation procedure, the network traffic as well as the usage of CPU and memory should be taken into account because the network bandwidth is also a critical resource. Since the network traffic of two servers or applications can be eliminated when they are consolidated into the same machine, traditional binpacking algorithms for the consolidation may not work efficiently. In this paper, we propose a cluster based consolidation algorithm, which reduces the maximum resource usage ratio of the machines. Through extensive simulation analysis, we show that the network traffic based clustering approach achieves a near optimal maximum resource usage, that is, the usage is close to the simple lower bound that only considers CPU and memory usage.