SEEVMC: A secure, energy‐efficient virtual machine consolation approach for QoS in cloud data centers

Abstract Cloud computing faces challenges in energy consumption and quality of service (QoS). Virtual machine (VM) consolidation, involving relocation between hosts, helps reduce power usage and enhance QoS. OpenStack Neat, a leading VM consolidation framework, uses the modified best‐fit decreasing (MBFD) strategy but faces energy consumption and QoS issues. To address these, we present the secure energy efficient VM consolidation (SEEVMC) method, introducing a unique host selection criterion based on incurred loss during VM placement. We evaluated SEEVMC with real‐time workload data from PlanetLab and Materna over ten days using CloudSim. For PlanetLab, SEEVMC reduced energy consumption by 78.33%, 57.74%, 19.57%, and 6.30% and reduced system‐level agreement (SLA) violations by 92.49%, 92.78%, 45.16%, and 15.67%, compared with MBFD, power‐aware best fit decreasing, medium fit power efficient decreasing, and power‐efficient bit decreasing. For Materna, SEEVMC reduced energy consumption by 14.12%, 59.5%, 3.92%, and 3.80% and fewer SLA violations by 74.85%, 86.95%, 11.40%, and 46.60%. SEEVMC also reduced VM migrations and SLA time per active host, improving cloud computing efficiency.