A Fault Tolerance Aware Virtual Machine Scheduling Algorithm in Cloud Computing

摘要

Virtual machine (VM) scheduling in cloud computing is a complicated problem, particularly when taking reliability factors into account. In modern cloud datacenters, cloud providers may adopt fault tolerance techniques to improve their service reliability, which will in turn influence the performance metrics of VM scheduling. This influence is worthy of further investigation. However, few studies have considered fault tolerance in VM scheduling and explored its impact. This paper studies fault tolerance aware VM scheduling with cost optimization in clouds by considering the probability that a physical server may fail during execution. The optimization objective of the studied problem is to minimize the expectation of all cloud users' total execution costs under fault tolerance aware cloud environments. Then, a modified best fit decreasing (MBFD) algorithm is proposed based on a defined cost efficiency factor. The simulation results show that fault tolerance can significantly influence the execution time of VM requests, and the proposed MBFD algorithm can improve VM requests' successful execution rate, reduce the average execution costs of cloud users, and thus achieve better performance under fault tolerance aware cloud environments.