A comparative analysis of classification and regression models for energy-efficient clouds

Consolidation of virtual machines (VM) is one of the key strategies used to reduce the power consumption of Cloud servers. For this reason, it is extensively studied. Consolidation has the goal of allocating virtual machines on a few physical servers as possible while satisfying the Service Level Agreement established with users. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of a con-solidation strategy strongly depends on the forecast of the VMs resource needs. This paper presents the experimental evaluation of a system for energy-aware allocation of virtual machines, driven by predictive data mining models. Migrations are driven by the forecast of the future computational needs (CPU, RAM) of each virtual machine, in order to efficiently allocate those on the available servers. The experimental evaluation, performed on real-world Cloud data traces, reports a comparison of performance achieved by exploiting classification and regression models and shows good benefits in terms of energy saving.