Adaptive DRL-Based Virtual Machine Consolidation in Energy-Efficient Cloud Data Center

The dramatic increasing of data and demands for computing capabilities may result in excessive use of resources in cloud data centers, which not only causes the raising of energy consumption, but also leads to the violation of Service Level Agreement (SLA). Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is proven to be an efficient way to tackle this issue. In this paper, we present an Adaptive Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based Virtual Machine Consolidation (ADVMC) framework for energy-efficient cloud data centers. ADVMC has two phases. In the first phase, Influence Coefficient is introduced to measure the impact of a VM on producing host overload, and a dynamic Influence Coefficient-based VM selection algorithm (ICVMS) is proposed to preferentially choose those VMs with the greatest impact for migration in order to remove the excessive workloads of the overloaded host quickly and accurately. In the second phase, a Prediction Aware DRL-based VM placement method (PADRL) is further proposed to automatically find suitable hosts for VMs to be migrated, in which a state prediction network is designed based on LSTM to provide DRL-based model more reasonable environment states so as to accelerate the convergence of DRL. Simulation experiments on the real-world workload provided by Google Cluster Trace have shown that our ADVMC approach can largely cut down system energy consumption and reduce SLA violation of users as compared to many other VM consolidation policies.