Energy optimization schemes in cluster with virtual machines

Large scale clusters based on virtualization technologies have been widely used in many areas, including the data center and cloud computing environment. But how to save energy is a big challenge for building a “green cluster” recently. However, previous researches, including local approaches, which focus on saving the energy of the components in a single workstation without a global vision on the whole cluster, and cluster-wide energy saving techniques, which can only be applied to homogeneous workstations and specific applications, cannot solve the challenges. This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel scheme, called Magnet, that uses live migration of virtual machines to transfer load among the nodes on a multi-layer ring-based overlay. This scheme can reduce the power consumption greatly by regarding all the cluster nodes as a whole based on virtualization technologies. And, it can be applied to both the homogeneous and heterogeneous servers. Experimental measurements show that the new method can reduce the power consumption by 74.8% over base at most with certain adjustably acceptable overhead. The effectiveness and performance insights are also analytically verified.