International Journal of Computer Science Issues

More than a traditional journal...

Virtualization is an innovation that has widely been utilized in modern data centers for cloud computing to realize energy-efficient operations of servers. Virtual machine (VM) migration brings multiple benefits such as resource distribution and energy aware consolidation. Server consolidation achieves energy efficiency by enabling multiple instances of operating systems to run simultaneously on a single machine. With virtualization, it is possible to consolidate severs through VM live migration. However, migration of virtual machines brings extra energy consumption and serious security concerns that derail full adoption of this technology. In this paper, we propose a secure energy-aware provisioning of cloud computing resources on consolidated and virtualized platforms. Energy efficiency is achieved through just-right dynamic Round-Robin provisioning mechanism and the ability to power down sub-systems of a host system that are not required by VMs mapped to it. We further propose solutions to security challenges faced during VM live migration. We validate our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using CloudSim toolkit. The experimental results show that our approach achieves reduced energy consumption in data centers while not compromising on security.