An energy-aware virtual machine migration strategy based on three-way decisions

Virtual machine migration (VMM) is a crucial way to ensure load balancing and save energy consumption of cloud hosts. In most previous studies, they apply the same virtual machine migration strategy for overloaded hosts, which ignore the possible communication between the migrated VM, and other factors. Thus, they are prone to incur excessive network overhead. This paper proposes a virtual machine migration strategy based on the three-way decision (VMM-3WD) to save cloud hosts’ energy consumption while considering the network correlation between virtual machines. The strategy first is to classify hosts into overloaded hosts, regular load hosts, and under-loaded hosts based on their load situation. Then, different migration strategies are targeted developed for these three types of cloud hosts. Specifically, the approach migrates the VMs in under-loaded hosts to regular load hosts. And then, the approach further develops two thresholds to divides overloaded hosts into massively overloaded hosts, moderately overloaded, and lightly overloaded hosts. The migration decision of VMs in all stages pursuing the goal of reducing the energy consumption of the network during the migration process. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the energy consumption generated by virtual machine migration and data center (DC) energy consumption while meeting the SLA.