Virtual Machine Placement in IaaS Cloud

Costs In A Cloud

Setting up a data center is a capital intensive undertaking, as there are a lot costs involved including the cost of procuring the infrastructure, both technological and real-estate, and the costs associated with running a data center, which include the costs for electricity for cooling purposes and powering the servers and network components, and the costs for human resource required to ensure an efficient running of the systems.

Also, since a cloud provider is offering the cloud service commercially, there is also an angle of performance guarantees (called SLA, or, Service Level Agreement), and the associated penalties, involved.

From the perspective of VM Placement algorithms, we would like to take into account some of these costs to as to make placement decisions that are frugal on one or more of these costs. Any Virtual Machine placement strategy tries to optimize either one or more of these costs. The costs that one chooses to save on varies from case to case, as we shall see in the following sections. A general structure of data center is provided in Figure 1

Figure 1.

General structure of a data center

These costs can be divided into the following broad categories: