Renewable energy-aware inter-datacenter virtual machine migration over elastic optical networks

Datacenters (DCs) are deployed in a large scale to support the ever increasing demand for data processing to support various applications. The energy consumption of DCs becomes a critical issue. Powering DCs with renewable energy can effectively reduce the brown energy consumption and thus alleviates the energy consumption problem. Owing to geographical deployments of DCs, the renewable energy generation and the data processing demands usually vary in different DCs. Migrating virtual machines (VMs) among DCs according to the availability of renewable energy helps match the energy demands and the renewable energy generation in DCs, and thus maximizes the utilization of renewable energy. Since migrating VMs incurs additional traffic in the network, the VM migration is constrained by the network capacity. The inter-datacenter (inter-DC) VM migration with network capacity constraints is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose two heuristic algorithms that approximate the optimal VM migration solution. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed algorithms, by migrating VM among DCs, can reduce up to 31% of brown energy consumption.