Network-aware virtual machine placement and migration in cloud data centers

With the pragmatic realization of computing as a utility, Cloud Computing has recently emerged as a highly successful alternative IT paradigm. Cloud providers are deploying large-scale data centers across the globe to meet the Cloud customers’ compute, storage, and network resource demands. Efficiency and scalability of these data centers, as well as the performance of the hosted applications’ highly depend on the allocations of the data center resources. Very recently, network-aware Virtual Machine (VM) placement and migration is developing as a very promising technique for the optimization of compute-network resource utilization, energy consumption, and network traffic minimization. This chapter presents the relevant background information and a detailed taxonomy that characterizes and classifies the various components of VM placement and migration techniques, as well as an elaborate survey and comparative analysis of the state of the art techniques. Besides highlighting the various aspects and insights of the network-aware VM placement and migration strategies and algorithms proposed by the research community, the survey further identifies the benefits and limitations of the existing techniques and discusses on the future research directions