Revisiting virtual machine consolidation to save resources and energy in heterogeneous production cloud infrastructures

Due to some overprovisioning policies and variable usage, data centers in production can face low average resource utilization. This can result in a waste of underused servers and energy. In this context, virtual machine (VM) consolidation combined with shutdown policies can be a pertinent approach for improving resource utilization and reducing energy consumption of the entire cloud infrastructure. However, VM consolidation requires expensive migration techniques, which can potentially affect performance. Consolidation of workload has been proposed and studied as a core capability since the invention of the Cloud. But after two decades of deployment of Cloud infrastructures, VM consolidation is still rarely used in production for small and large-scale environments. In this article, we explore and revisit the potential of savings that can be achieved through a versatile and efficient Virtual Machine consolidation in small and large-scale production infrastructures through usage analysis of two Cloud providers infrastructures. We show that potential benefits in terms of saved cloud resources and energy usage reduction can occur for systems in production.