Minimizing virtual machine migration probability in cloud computing environments

Virtualization provides the flexibility to distribute the workload among physical servers to reduce overall electrical power consumption, through the consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs). Many research projects have been done on VM migration to reduce energy consumption in data centers while ensuring a high level of adherence to the Service Level Agreements (SLA). Service levels of running applications are likely to be negatively affected during a live VM migration. For this reason, in this paper, we propose a new intelligent VM migration approach, called CLANFIC, which utilizes modified Cellular Learning Automata based Evolutionary Computing (CLA-EC) and neuro-fuzzy to minimize the number of VM migrations and improve energy consumption. This goal is achieved by utilizing an optimized placement method and delaying migration time based on future resource demand prediction. This algorithm reduces the number of migrations in two steps (i) finding the optimal virtual machine placement and replacement on physical servers by using modified CLA-EC (ii) predicting future resource usage in each host by a neuro-fuzzy algorithm to prevent unnecessary migrations. The experimental results on the real workload traces from PlanetLab show that the proposed method reduces the mean migration number, energy consumption, and SLA violation of the data center by 59.05%, 8.5%, and 70.76%, respectively.