Abstract: A genetic algorithm based approach for virtual machine placement called GA-VMP was proposed. In GA-VMP, local regression robust (LRR) algorithm was adopted to identify critical hosts in the physical host status detection procedure; minimum migration time (MMT) policy was also used for selecting VMs on critical hosts to be migrated. In the virtual placement, genetic algorithm was used to find a near-optimal solution and thus formed a new virtual machine migration model called LRR-MMT-GA. The mathematic model for energy consumption in GA-VMP was also designed and the minimized energy consumption was used as the objective function in genetic algorithm. The experimental results and performance analysis show our strategy leads to a further improvement in energy consumption and virtual machine migration. Our strategy is helpful for other cloud providers to build a low energy consumption cloud data center.

Key words: intelligent algorithm, physical host, virtual machine consolidation, virtual machine allocation, genetic algorithm