On Reliability-Aware Server Consolidation in Cloud Datacenters

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical model for server consolidation in cloud datacenters that balances energy efficiency with hardware reliability, aiming to reduce total costs including energy and maintenance.

Contribution

It introduces a reliability-aware consolidation model formulated as an NP-complete MILP, integrating energy savings with hardware wear considerations.

Findings

The model effectively reduces energy consumption and hardware wear in simulations.

Reliability-aware consolidation outperforms traditional methods in cost minimization.

Extensive MATLAB simulations validate the approach across various scenarios.

Abstract

In the past few years, datacenter (DC) energy consumption has become an important issue in technology world. Server consolidation using virtualization and virtual machine (VM) live migration allows cloud DCs to improve resource utilization and hence energy efficiency. In order to save energy, consolidation techniques try to turn off the idle servers, while because of workload fluctuations, these offline servers should be turned on to support the increased resource demands. These repeated on-off cycles could affect the hardware reliability and wear-and-tear of servers and as a result, increase the maintenance and replacement costs. In this paper we propose a holistic mathematical model for reliability-aware server consolidation with the objective of minimizing total DC costs including energy and reliability costs. In fact, we try to minimize the number of active PMs and racks, in a reliability-aware manner. We formulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model which is in form of NP-complete. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our approach in different scenarios using extensive numerical MATLAB simulations.