The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.
Server consolidation is important for better resource utilization and efficient energy saving for cloud datacenters which host thousands of virtual machines (VMs) to support multitenant applications. The typical approach is to migrate VMs and reallocate workload among different servers in a way to minimize the total number of servers used. However, most existing works for server consolidation focus mainly on how to reduce the number of active servers and do not account for the migration overhead incurred to the applications on the migrating VMs (such as downtime). In this paper, we propose an adaptive mechanism to schedule VM allocation in cloud datacenters. Our solution takes into account the resource utilization and migration overheads, and adaptively allocates each VM to servers based on the estimated saturation level. As a result, the quality and overhead of consolidation is balanced and the total cost is minimized. The simulation results show that our mechanism could increase the average utilization on servers by up to 97 while reducing the total migration cost by about 60 , as compared with existing solutions. The aim of Green Cloud Computing is to achieve a balance between the resource consumption and quality of service. In order to achieve this objective and to maintain the flexibility of the cloud, dynamic provisioning and allocation strategies are needed to regulate the internal settings of the cloud to address oscillatory peaks of workload. In this context, we propose strategies to optimize the use of the cloud resources without decreasing the availability. This work introduces two hybrid strategies based on a distributed system management model, describes the base strategies, operation principles, tests, and presents the results. We combine existing strategies to search their benefits. To test them, we extended CloudSim to simulate the organization model upon which we were based and to implement the strategies, using this improved version to validate our solution. Achieving a consumption reduction up to 87 comparing Standard Clouds with Green Clouds, and up to 52 comparing the proposed strategy with other Green Cloud Strategy. The rapid growth in demand for computational power driven by modern service applications combined with the shift to the Cloud computing model have led to the establishment of large-scale virtualized data centers. Such data centers consume enormous amounts of electrical energy resulting in high operating costs and carbon dioxide emissions. Dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) using live migration and switching idle nodes to the sleep mode allows Cloud providers to optimize resource usage and reduce energy consumption. However, the obligation of providing high quality of service to customers leads to the necessity in dealing with the energy-performance trade-off, as aggressive consolidation may lead to performance degradation. Because of the variability of workloads experienced by modern applications, the VM placement should be optimized continuously in an online manner. To understand the implications of the online nature of the problem, we conduct a competitive analysis and prove competitive ratios of optimal online deterministic algorithms for the single VM migration and dynamic VM consolidation problems. Furthermore, we propose novel adaptive heuristics for dynamic consolidation of VMs based on an analysis of historical data from the resource usage by VMs. The proposed algorithms significantly reduce energy consumption, while ensuring a high level of adherence to the service level agreement. We validate the high efficiency of the proposed algorithms by extensive simulations using real-world workload traces from more than a thousand PlanetLab VMs. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The rising computing demands of scientific endeavors often require the creation and management of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems for running experiments and processing vast amounts of data. These HPC systems generally operate at peak performance, consuming a large quantity of electricity, even though their workload varies over time. Understanding the behavioral patterns (i.e., phases) of HPC systems during their use is key to adjust performance to resource demand and hence improve the energy efficiency. In this paper, we describe (i) a method to detect phases of an HPC system based on its workload, and (ii) a partial phase recognition technique that works cooperatively with on-the-fly dynamic management. We implement a prototype that guides the use of energy saving capabilities to demonstrate the benefits of our approach. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the phase detection method under real-life workload and benchmarks. A comparison with baseline unmanaged execution shows that the partial phase recognition technique saves up to 15 of energy with less than 1 performance degradation.