Management Infrastructures for Power-Efficient Cloud Computing Architectures

The surging demand for inexpensive and scalable IT infrastructures has led to the widespread adoption of Cloud computing architectures. These architectures have therefore reached their momentum due to inherent capacity of simplification in IT infrastructure building and maintenance, by making related costs easily accountable and paid on a pay-per-use basis. Cloud providers strive to host as many service providers as possible to increase their economical income and, toward that goal, exploit virtualization techniques to enable the provisioning of multiple virtual machines (VMs), possibly belonging to different service providers, on the same host. At the same time, virtualization technologies enable runtime VM migration that is very useful to dynamically manage Cloud resources. Leveraging these features, data center management infrastructures can allocate running VMs on as few hosts as possible, so to reduce total power consumption by switching off not required servers. This chapter presents and discusses management infrastructures for power-efficient Cloud architectures. Power efficiency relates to the amount of power required to run a particular workload on the Cloud and pushes toward greedy consolidation of VMs. However, because Cloud providers offer Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) that need to be enforced to prevent unacceptable runtime performance, the design and the implementation of a management infrastructure for power-efficient Cloud architectures are extremely complex tasks and have to deal with heterogeneous aspects, e.g., SLA representation and enforcement, runtime reconfigurations, and workload prediction. This chapter aims at presenting the current state of the art of powerefficient management infrastructure for Cloud, by carefully considering main realization issues, design guidelines, and design choices. In addition, after an in-depth presentation of related works in this area, it presents some novel experimental results to better stress the complexities introduced by power-efficient management infrastructure for Cloud.