Automatic Consolidation of Virtual Machines in On-premises Cloud Platforms

摘要

After a sequence of creation and destruction of virtual machines (VMs) in an on-premises Cloud computing platform, the scheduling decisions to host the VMs are far from being optimal and the fragmentation of the physical resources may impede the platform to host some VMs despite the free available virtualization resources. This paper describes a Virtual Machine Consolidation Agent that addresses this problem by analyzing the distribution of the VMs in the virtualization platform to migrate some of them among hosts, in order to defragment the physical resources and to enhance the efficiency on their usage. The agent has been validated in a production platform, where it is capable of minimizing the number of servers needed to host the VMs. The algorithms achieve near-optimal values at a very reduced computational cost, thus making it suitable for production platforms.