Simulated-annealing load balancing for resource allocation in cloud environments

Abstract

Recently, the development of cloud computing has received considerable attention. For cloud service providers, packing VMs onto a small number of servers is an effective way to reduce energy costs, so as to improve the efficiency of the data center. However allocating too many VMs on a physical machine may cause some hotspots which viloate the SLA of applications. Load balancing of the entire system is hence needed to guarantee the SLA. In this paper, we present a simulated-annealing load balancing algortihm for solving the resource allocation and scheduling problem in a cloud computing environment. Experimental results show that this method is able to achieve load balancing, and performs better than the roundrobin and basic simulated-annealing algorithms.