An energy aware framework for virtual machine placement in cloud federated data centres

Data centres are powerful ICT facilities which constantly evolve in size, complexity, and power consumption. At the same time users´ and operators´ requirements become more and more complex. However, existing data centre frameworks do not typically take energy consumption into account as a key parameter of the data centre´s configuration. To lower the power consumption while fulfilling performance requirements we propose a flexible and energy-aware framework for the (re)allocation of virtual machines in a data centre. The framework, being independent from the data centre management system, computes and enacts the best possible placement of virtual machines based on constraints expressed through service level agreements. The framework´s flexibility is achieved by decoupling the expressed constraints from the algorithms using the Constraint Programming (CP) paradigm and programming language, basing ourselves on a cluster management library called Entropy. Finally, the experimental and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in achieving the pursued energy optimization goals.