Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Management in Heterogeneous Environment: Challenges, Approaches and Opportunities

In recent years, energy-efficiency became increasingly important for large-scale data centers due to its huge economic and environmental impacts. Although one significant spirit of system virtualization is to hide the heterogeneity of system resources, fully exploring the energy-efficiency potential of large-scale data center requires the virtual machine management mechanism that takes into account the heterogeneity of the system resources. This paper focuses on energy management challenges derived from system heterogeneity in cloud computing. We survey key energy management approaches addressing heterogeneity issues. We also discuss research opportunities in this area.