Lifetime or Energy: Consolidating Servers with Reliability Control in Virtualized Cloud Datacenters
Server consolidation using virtualization technologies allow cloud-scale datacenters to improve resource utilization and energy efficiency. However, most existing consolidation strategies solely focused on balancing the tradeoff between Service-Level-Agreements (SLAs) desired by cloud applications and energy costs consumed by hosting servers. With the presence of fluctuating workloads in datacenters, the lifetime and reliability of servers under dynamic power-aware consolidation could be adversely impacted by repeated on-off thermal cycles, wear-and-tear and temperature rise. In this paper, the authors propose a Reliability-Aware server Consolidation strategy, named RACE, to address when and how to perform energy-efficient server consolidation in a reliability-friendly and profitable way.