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Network failure-aware redundant virtual machine placement in a cloud data

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Article  in  Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · August 2017

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MANUSCRIPT ID 1

Network Failure-aware Redundant Virtual

Machine Placement in a Cloud Data Center
Ao Zhou, Shangguang Wang, Ching-Hsien Hsu, Myung Ho Kim

Abstract—Cloud has become a very popular infrastructure for many smart city applications. A growing number of smart city
applications from all over the world are deployed on the clouds. However, node failure events from the cloud data center have
negative impact on the performance of smart city applications. Survivable virtual machine placement has been proposed by the
researchers to enhance the service reliability. Due to the ignorance of switch failure, current survivable virtual machine
placement approaches cannot achieve the best effect. In this paper, we study to enhance the service reliability by designing a
novel network failure-aware redundant virtual machine placement approach in a cloud data center. Firstly, we formulate the
network failure-aware redundant virtual machine placement problem as an integer non-linear programming problem and prove
that the problem is NP-hard. Secondly, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Finally, extensive simulation
results show the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Index Terms—cloud computing, virtual machine placement, reliability, smart city application

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

R ecently, cloud computing has gained widespread

concern from a growing number of application pro-
viders [1, 2]. For the low maintenance cost and on-
demand use nature of cloud computing, it has become a
very popular infrastructure for many smart city applica-
tions [3]. We have witnessed many smart city applications
from all over the world deployed on the clouds from In-
frastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon
EC2 [4, 5]. Tasks of those smart city applications are sub-
mitted and execute in the virtual machines. Therefore,
application providers rent virtual machines from IaaS
providers to reduce the monetary cost [6, 7]. However,
failure events (such as host server failures) from the cloud
data center directly affects the performances of the hosted
smart city applications. Thus, reliability enhancement for
applications in the cloud computing environment has
become an urgently required research problem [8, 9]. In
this paper, application and service are used alternately
with the same meaning.
In a cloud data center, virtual machine can become un-
available caused by the host server failure or software
faults [10]. To overcome this problem, survivable virtual
machine placement has been proposed by the researchers
for composited application[11], such as many smart city
applications. Traditionally, many smart city applications
are complex, and the main smart city application is divid-
ed into several sub-applications. The sub-applications are
mapped to a group of virtual machines. Each sub-
application is hosted by a virtual machine. In survivable
virtual machine placement approach, each virtual ma-
————————————————
 Ao Zhou, Shangguang Wang is with the State Key Laboratory of Network- the edge switch failure-aware virtual machine placement
ing and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecom- approach confronts. None of current proposed edge
munications. E-mail: aozhou@ bupt.edu.cn, sgwang@ bupt.edu.cn.
 Ching-Hsien Hsu is with Department of Computer Science and Infor-
mation Engineering, Chung Hua University E-mail: chh @ chu.edu.tw.
 Myung Ho Kim is with School of Software, Soongsil University, E-mail:
kmh @ ssu.ac.kr.
xxxx-xxxx/0x/$xx.00 © 200x
chine that hosts a critical sub-application is mapping to a
backup virtual machine. The backup virtual machine is
synchronized with the active virtual machine. When a
failure event occurs, the interrupted sub-application is
switched to the backup virtual machine. “Critical applica-
tion” denotes that the sub-application cannot tolerate any
disruption. As we known, it is unnecessary to start up a
backup for each virtual machine in the cloud data center.
The active virtual machine and its backup virtual ma-
chine are placed on different servers to enhancement the
reliability.
However, the traditional redundant virtual machine
placement approach may become out of use when a net-
work failure occurs. Fat-tree data center network [12, 13]
is commonly adopted by the IaaS providers. Fig. 1 illus-
trates the topology structure of fat-tree data center net-
work. In fat-tree data center network, redundancy is em-
ployed in the first layer (the core layer) and the the sec-
ond layer (the aggregation layer). Therefore, the core lay-
er and the aggregation are fairly reliable. However, when
a switch in the third layer (the edge layer) fails, all the
servers connected to it become inaccessible. In traditional
redundant virtual machine placement approach, the ac-
tive virtual machine and its backup are prone to be placed
on two servers in the same subnet to reduce the network
resource consumption. Two virtual machines with heavy
inter-traffic are also prone to be placed on the same sub-
net. The service easily becomes unavailable when an edge
switch fails.
Several edge switch failure-aware virtual machine
placement approaches have been proposed by the re-
searchers [14, 15]. However, there is still some challenges
switch failure-aware approach employs redundancy
strategy and considers the placement of backup virtual
2 MANUSCRIPT ID
Fig. 1 Redundant virtual machine placement in fat-tree data center network.
machine. In addition, there is no inter-traffic between a
backup virtual machine and other active virtual machines
before failure event occurs. However, the backup virtual
machine should interact with other active virtual machine
after a failure event occurs. Without considering this con-
dition, the virtual machine placement approaches con-
sumes too much upper network resource. The core layer,
which is the bottleneck of a fat-tree data center, would be
over-utilized.
In this paper, we investigate the network failure-aware
redundant virtual machine placement problem in a cloud
data center. Our contributions are summarized as follows:
1) By mining the characteristic of the data center net-
work, we specially investigate how to apply replication
technique to enhance the service reliability. We formulate
the network failure-aware redundant virtual machine
placement problem into an Integer Non-Linear Pro-
gramming (INLP) problem.
2) We prove that the network failure-aware redundant
virtual machine placement problem is a NP-hard problem.
An efficient heuristic algorithm EFAP (Edge switch Fail-
ure Aware Placement) is presented for the problem.
3) Extensive simulation results show that our algo-
rithm can ensure the service reliability and avoid adding
burden to the bottleneck of data center.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
describes related work. Section 3 lists the system model,
and the challenges in the network failure-aware redun-
dant virtual machine placement. The problem formula-
tion is proposed in Section 4. Section 5 presents the details
of the proposed algorithm. Section 6 shows experiment
results, and Section 7 concludes the paper.
2 RELATED WORK
Many notable cloud service reliability enhancement ap-
proaches have been proposed by the researchers.
Checkpoint mechanism achieves fault tolerance by
saving the virtual machine state as a checkpoint image
periodically during failure-free execution [16]. A check-
point image contains the whole recovery information.
Because of the dynamic nature of Infrastructure as a Ser-
vice clouds, it is hard to design an efficient checkpoint
mechanism. To address the problem, [17] proposed an
optimal checkpoint mechanism aiming at minimizing the
performance overhead and storage resource consumption.
In order to efficiently save the complete running state of
the application, the propose checkpoint mechanism lever-
ages new functions, such as disk-image multi-
snapshotting, and inside checkpoint protocols. [18] pre-
sented an incremental checkpoint mechanism in cloud
data center. To reduce the network resource consumption
and the time needed to take a checkpoint image, only
modifications compared with latest stored checkpoint
image is checkpointed. [19, 20] presented distributed
checkpoint image storage system in fat-tree data center to
reduce the upper layer data center network resource con-
sumption. In the distributed checkpoint image storage
system, the checkpoint images are storage on the nearby
host server.
AUTHOR ET AL.: TITLE
(a)
(c)
Fig. 2 Different redundant virtual machine placement strategies.
Checkpoint mechanism is suitable for large scale compu-
tation-intensive service. To address the problem, replica-
tion is another mechanism that can be employed
Taking the quality of service requirement of applica-
tions into consideration, [21] presented two optimal data
replications approaches in cloud computing environment.
[22] proposed a k-fault tolerant virtual machine placement
approach. The proposed approach can minimize the
number of running server while satisfy the quality of ser-
vice requirements at any k physical server failures. Only
atomic service is considered in the proposed approaches.
[14, 15, 23] proposed reliability enhancement approaches
for complex application. [14] proposed a reliable virtual
data center mapping algorithm. Considering both the
failure characteristic of hardware and the impact of indi-
vidual failures on service reliability, the mapping algo-
rithm tries to achieve high reliability and low cost. To
improve the reliability and performance deployed in
cloud data center, [23] presented a structural constraint-
aware virtual machine placement algorithm. The service
availability is formulated as a combination of colloca-
tion/anti-collocation constraints. In a cloud data center,
the Infrastructure as a Service provider intends to place a
group of virtual machines with high inter-traffic to the
same subnet to reduce intra-network traffic. However, the
3
(b)
(d)
service reliability cannot be ensured. A novel virtual ma-
chine placement algorithm is proposed to minimize the
network traffic under the reliability constraints. [15] pro-
posed an availability-aware virtual machine mapping
algorithm to improve the network resource utilization
and service reliability for a multi-tier application. The
approaches do not employ replication mechanism.
In [11], a backup virtual machine is created for each
critical virtual machine to enhance the survivability.
When a server fails or a virtual machine failure occurs,
the affected service is switched over to the backup virtual
machine. The group of correlated virtual machine and
their backups compose a survivable virtual machine set.
An efficient algorithm is proposed to map the survivable
virtual machine set to a cloud data center. [24] identified
the significant components of a complex application and
determine the most suitable reliability enhancement strat-
egy for each identified component. The significance of
each component is calculated based on the invocation
frequencies and invocation structures. However, the tra-
ditional redundant virtual machine placement approach-
es may become out of use when a network failure occurs.
We will address above-mentioned problems in this
paper.
4 MANUSCRIPT ID

TABLE 1 tree data center, is often over-utilized.

NOTATIONS
3.2 Application Model
Symbol Meaning
For a complex smart city application, the main applica-
Vp A primary node in a application structure
tion is divided into several sub-applications. We model
graph
complex smart city application as a graph G  (V , E ) ,
Vb A backup node in a application structure graph
where each vertex denotes a virtual machine. There are
Ep A primary edge in a application structure two types of node in the graph: primary node (denoted
graph by Vp ) and backup node (denoted by Vb ). There are two
Eb A backup edge in a application structure graph types of edges in the graph. There is a primary edge (de-
CSi A core switch of a fat-tree data center network noted by Ep ) connecting a pair of primary vertices if the
two virtual machines need to interact with each other. In
AS j A aggregation switch of a fat-tree data center
addition, there is a primary edge connecting a primary
network
vertex and its backup vertex because the backup virtual
ESk A edge switch of a fat-tree data center network
machine is synchronized with the active virtual machine
ds () The distance between two host server periodically. There is a backup edge (denoted by Eb )
dt () The data interaction rate between two virtual connecting a backup vertex V and a primary vertex V if
machines corresponding primary virtual machine of V needs to
pod y A pod in a cloud data center interact with V . When a failure event occurs, the inter-
rupted sub-application is switched to the backup virtual
subx A subnet in a cloud data center machine. A “backup edge” denotes that there are interac-
vmvp ,i A primary virtual machine tions between two vertices only after failures occur.

vm B The backup virtual machine that is allocated for

vp ,i
vmvp ,i
hs k A host server in a cloud data center
r cpu CPU requirements of a primary or backup vir-
tual machine
r mem Memory requirements of a primary or backup
virtual machine
r disk Disk requirements of a primary or backup vir-
tual machine
c cpu Current available CPU resource
c mem Current available memory resource
c disk
Current available disk resource
3 SYSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM STATEMENT
3.1 Data Center Model
We consider the problem in a fat-tree data center. A
fat-tree data center is composed of four layer nodes. The
top layer is composed of a group of core switches (denot-
ed by CSi ). The second layer is composed of a group of
aggregation switches (denoted by AS j ). The third layer is
composed of a group of edge switches (denoted by ES k ).
The bottom layer is composed of a group of physical/host
servers (denoted by hsi ). The physical servers that con-
nect to the network through the same edge switches are
called in the same subnet (denoted by subx ). The physical
servers that connet to through the same aggregation
switches are called in the same pod (denoted by pod y ).
When the physical servers in the same subnet com-
municate with each other, only the edge layer network
resources are consumed. When the physical servers in
different pods communicate with each other, the edge,
aggregation, and core layer network resources should be
consumed. The core layer, which is the bottleneck of a fat-
3.3 Problem Statement
We will illustrate the research problem of this paper by
using a simple example.
All primary virtual machines and backup virtual ma-
chines should be placed on physical servers. To enhance
the service reliability, the traditional algorithms try to
spread the virtual machines with frequent interaction
across multiple servers in the same subnet. Fig .2(a) illus-
trates the structure of an application. Fig .2(b) illustrates a
traditional reliability-aware virtual machine placement
strategy. In fat-tree data center network, redundancy is
employed in the core layer and the aggregation layer.
Therefore, the core layer and the aggregation layer are
fairly reliable. However, when a switch in the edge layer
fails, all the servers connected to it become inaccessible.
As shown in Fig. 2(b), the application is interrupted when
the red server fails. Therefore, we should take the edge
switch failure into consideration in virtual machine
placement. A simple strategy is to spread all virtual ma-
chine with high inter-traffic across multiple subnets.
However, the data center network resource consumption
varies when different strategies are employed. Fig. 2(c)
and Fig. 2(d) illustrates two placement strategies. Sup-
pose the mutual-traffic between vma and vmc is heavier
than the mutual-traffic between vma and vmd . Therefore,
strategy in Fig.2(c) would consume much more upper
layer network resources. There is another problem we
should address. Although there is no inter-traffic between
a backup virtual machine and other active virtual ma-
chines, the backup virtual machine should communicate
with other active virtual machines after a failure event
occurs. We should take this into consideration when de-
sign the virtual machine placement strategy.
We will address the above-mentioned problems in this
paper.
AUTHOR ET AL.: TITLE 5

4 PROBLEM FORMULATION 4.1 Virtual Machine Interaction Constraints

In this section, we formulate the virtual machine It is well-known that a primary virtual machine and its
placement problem. corresponding backup virtual machine should be placed
on host servers in different subnets. Otherwise, an edge
4.1 Virtual Machine Placement Constraints switch failure would result in service interruption. This
Suppose the virtual machines that are allocated for an constraint can be expressed by the following:
application are denoted by the following:  Yvmk Yvmk =0
k
v p ,i
B
(12)
v p ,i

VM P  {vmv p ,1 , vmvp ,2 ,..., vmvp ,N } (1)

All primary virtual machines allocated for a specific
The backup virtual machine that is allocated for vmvp ,i service should be placed on host servers in different sub-
B nets to minimize the effect of failure. This constraint can
is denoted by vmvp ,i .
be expressed by the following:
As we known, all the primary virtual machine and its
corresponding backup virtual machine should be placed
 Yvmk Yvmk B =0
k
v p ,i vp, j
(13)

on host servers. Several binary variables are defined by us All backup virtual machines allocated for a specific
for virtual machine placement: service should be placed on host servers in different sub-
k 1, if virtual machine vm is placed on hsk nets. When a primary virtual machine becomes unavaila-
X vm  (2)
0, otherwise ble, the corresponding sub-service is quickly switched to
the backup virtual machine. The backup virtual machine
1, if virtual machine vm is placed on subk
Yvmk   (3) becomes a primary virtual machine. Therefore, two pri-
 0, otherwise mary virtual machine may be placed on virtual machines
k in the same subnet after failure events occur. This con-
X vm is equal to 1 when virtual machine vm is placed
k k straint can be expressed by the following:
on host server hs k . Otherwise, X vm is equal to 0. Yvm is
equal to 1 when virtual machine vm is placed on a host
 Yvmk B Yvmk B =0
k
v p ,i
(14)
vp, j

server in subnet subk . Otherwise, Yvm is equal to 0.

k A backup virtual machine and other primary virtual
machines should be placed on host servers in different
To ensure that each primary virtual machine is placed
subnets. The backup virtual machine becomes a primary
on one and only one host server, the following constraint
virtual machine when a failure event occurs. Two prima-
should be satisfied for any vmvp ,i :
ry virtual machines may be placed on host servers in the
j
X vmv p ,i 1 (4) same subnet in this condition. This constraint can be ex-
j pressed by the following:
To ensure that each backup virtual machine is placed
on one and only one host server, the following constraint
 Yvmk B Yvmk =0
k
v p ,i
(15)
vp, j

B
should be satisfied for any vm vp ,i :
4.2 Virtual Machine Interaction Cost
The virtual machines should interact with each other
j
X j
vmvBp ,i
1 (5) to provide a complex service. A large amount of data is
transferred between the virtual machines over the data
A host server should have enough available compu- center network. Different virtual machine placement
ting resource that can be allocated to the placed virtual strategies would result in different network resource con-
machine. This constraints can be expressed by the follow- sumption. We should minimize the network resource
ing: consumption. Three types of communication would con-
rvmcpuv X vmj v  c cpu
j
(6) sume data center network resource.
p ,i p ,i

CP denotes the network resource consumption caused

rvmmem
v
X vmj v  c mem
j
(7)
p ,i p ,i
by primary virtual machines interaction. CP can be calcu-
rvmdiskv X vmj v  c disk
j
(8)
lated by the following:
p ,i p ,i

m n
rvmcpuB X vmj B  c cpu
j
(9) Cp (vmvp ,i , vmvp , j )   X vmv
X vmv
dt (vmvp ,i , vmvp , j )ds(hsm , hsn )
v p ,i v p ,i p ,i p, j
m n
mem j mem
rvm vBp ,i
X vm vBp ,i
c j
(10) (16)
CP = C p (vmvp ,i , vmvp , j ) (17)
rvmdiskB X vmj B  c disk
j
(11) i j
v p ,i v p ,i

cpu where dt denotes the data interaction rate between two

r is the CPU requirements of a primary or backup
mem virtual machines, ds denotes the distance between two
virtual machine, r is the memory requirements of a
disk host servers.
primary or backup virtual machine, r is the disk re-
quirements of a primary or backup virtual machine, c cpu Because the backup virtual machine is synchronized
denotes the current available CPU resource, c mem denotes with the active virtual machine periodically, CB denotes
the current available memory resource, c disk denotes the the network resource consumption between a primary
current available disk resource. virtual machine and its backup virtual machine. CB can be
6 MANUSCRIPT ID

calculated by the following: chine placement problem involving only primary virtual
m
Cb (vmvp ,i )   X vm n
X vm B dt (vmv , vmvBp ,i )ds(hsm , hsn ) (18) machine can be solved, then it can be used to solve the
v p ,i
p ,i v p ,i
m n multidimensional packing problem [25, 26].
CB = Cb (vmvp ,i ) (19) Consider a special case of the network failure-aware
i redundant virtual machine placement problem: there are
When a failure event occurs, the interrupted sub- m number of host servers in the data center and n number
application is switched to the backup virtual machine. CV of primary virtual machines. Suppose there is no critical
denotes the network resource consumption between a sub-application. Therefore, the number of backup virtual
backup virtual machine and other virtual machines after machine is 0. The problem is to place all virtual machines
failure event occurs. on host servers with the goal of minimizing the network
Cv (vmvBp ,i , vm)   X vm
m
v
n
X vm dt (vmvp ,i , vm)ds(hsm , hsn ) (20) resource consumption. It is easy to see that an algorithm
p ,i
m n for solving the virtual machine placement problem can be
CV =  Cv (vmvBp ,i , vm) (21) used to solve the multidimensional packing problem. The
i vmVM ( vmvBp ,i ) multidimensional packing problem is NP-Hard [27, 28].
The proof outlined above shows that even a simpler case
where VM ( vmvBp ,i ) denotes the virtual machines that need of only primary virtual machine involved makes the
problem NP-Hard. Hence it follows that the network fail-
B
to interact with vmvp ,i after failure events occur. ure-aware redundant virtual machine placement problem
In a fat-tree cloud data center, there is no data need to is NP-Hard. End proof
be transferred by the data center network when two vir- There are tens of thousands of host servers in a data
tual machine are placed on the same host server. When center. Therefore, it is impractical to iterate all primary
two host servers are in the same subnet, the data should and backup virtual machine placement strategy. We will
be transferred by an edge switch. The distance is 2. When propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the INLP in this
the two host servers are in different subnets but the same paper.
pod, the data should be transferred by two edge switches
and an aggregation switch. The distance is 4. When the
two host servers are in different pods, the data should be
transferred by two edge switches, two aggregation
switches and a core switch. The distance is 6. Therefore,
the distance between two host servers is defined as fol-
lows:
0, if m  n
2, if hs and hs is in the same subnet
 m n
ds(hsm , hsn )   (22)
 4, if hsm and hsn isin the same pod
6, otherwise

4.4 An INLP Formulation

Our goal is to calculate the optimal primary and back-
up virtual machines placement strategy while minimizing
the total network resource consumption. The network
resource consumption is calculated by the following:
C =CP  CB   *CV (23)
 is a tunable parameter that is used to balance trade-
offs between actual communication and backup commu-
nication.
By summering all constraints discussed above, we can
formulate this virtual machine placement problem as a
integer non-linear programming as
INLP 1:
min: (23)
s.t.: (4-11), (12-15)
for i , j, m and  n
Proposition 1. The network failure-aware redundant
virtual machine placement problem is NP-Hard.
Proof: We reduce the multidimensional packing prob-
lem to the network failure-aware redundant virtual ma-
chine placement problem. The idea is that even a simpler
case of the network failure-aware redundant virtual ma-
AUTHOR ET AL.: TITLE
5 PROPOSED ALGORITHM
Our goal is to calculate the optimal primary and backup
virtual machines placement strategy while minimizing
the total network resource consumption. Based on the
topology of data center network, a heuristic algorithm is
proposed to solve the problem.
In fat-tree cloud data center, only edge layer and aggrega-
tion layer network resources are consumed when two
7
physical servers are in the same pod. Therefore, we at-
tempt to place the virtual machines with high inter-traffic
in the same pod. The algorithms are illustrated in Algo-
rithm 1 and Algorithm 2. As shown in Algorithm 1, we
sort all links based on the inter-traffic size and add all
pods to candidate pod set. Then, we iterate all pods and
decide the optimal pod that can host the most number of
virtual machines. Thirdly, the virtual machines that can
be placed on current optimal pod are removed from the
virtual machine set. In addition, current optimal pod is
removed from the candidate pod set. The above-
mentioned steps are repeated until all virtual machines
have been placed. As shown in Algorithm 2, we iterate
the links in the link list. The links in the link list have al-
ready been sorted in a descending order of data rate (in
Algorithm 1). A link is in the List if at least one node (de-
notes a virtual machine) of the link does not have been
placed. Then, we select available subnet(s) for the un-
placed node(s). The function find is used to find an avail-
able host server. The steps are repeated until there is no
available host server in current pod. “Available” denotes
that (6)-(15) are satisfied.
6 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
6.1 Experiment Setup
In our experiment, the network topology is a 32 port
fat-tree topology. The fat-tree data center network con-
sists of 32 pods, and 16 subnets in each pod. There are 16
host servers reside in each subnet. We generate 100 appli-
cations to be deployed in the cloud data center.  is 1.
The number of sub-applications is uniformly distributed
in [7, 8] for each application. The sub-applications are
serially connected. We randomly add 1 backup virtual
machine for each application. The execution time of each
sub-stage is 5 min. The data interaction rate falls to [0.8
MB/min, 1.2 MB/min]. 6000 tasks are generated for the
applications.
We compare our proposed algorithm with two other
algorithms:
(1) RANDOM. The target host server is randomly se-
lected. First fit strategy is employed to place the primary
and backup virtual machines.
(2) HFAP. Host server failure-aware redundant virtual
machine placement. The algorithm is proposed in [11].
HFAP only considers the host server failure in virtual
machine placement.
All algorithms are evaluated by using the following
metrics: (1) Total lost time. Total lost time that is caused
by failures. (2) Total delayed tasks. A task is delayed if a
primary virtual machine and its backup virtual machine
failed at the same time in the task execution. (3) Total data
that has been transferred by the edge switches. (4) Total
data that has been transferred by the aggregation switch-
es. (5) Total data that has been transferred by the core
switches.
8 MANUSCRIPT ID
Fig. 3 The number of delayed tasks under different failure rate set-
tings. X-axis denotes the failure rate, and Y-axis denotes the number
of delayed tasks.
Fig. 4 The total lost time under different failure rate settings. X-axis
denotes the failure rate, and Y-axis denotes the total lost time.
Fig. 5 The core layer network resource consumption under different
failure rate settings. X-axis denotes the failure rate, and Y-axis de-
notes the core layer network resource consumption.
Fig. 6 The aggregation layer network resource consumption under
different failure rate settings. X-axis denotes the failure rate, and Y-
axis denotes the aggregation layer network resource consumption.
Fig. 7 The edge layer network resource consumption under different
failure rate settings. X-axis denotes the failure rate, and Y-axis de-
notes the edge layer network resource consumption.
6.2 Performance Comparison under Different
Failure Rate
To study the impact of the edge switch failure rate on
the service reliability, we compare RANDOM, HFAP, and
EFAP under failure rate settings of 0 to 0.01 with a step
value of 0.002. The service number in this experiment is
100. Figs. 3-7 shows the experimental results of all meth-
ods under different failure rate settings.
Fig. 3 illustrates the total delayed tasks under different
failure rate. Fig. 4 illustrates the total lost time under dif-
ferent failure rate settings. Fig. 5 illustrates the total core
layer network resource consumption under different fail-
ure rate settings. Fig. 6 illustrates the total aggregation
layer network resource consumption under different fail-
ure rate settings. Fig. 7 illustrates the total edge layer
network resource consumption tasks under different fail-
ure rate settings.
AUTHOR ET AL.: TITLE
As shown in Fig. 3 and Fig 4, the total delayed task
number and the total lost time of all the three algorithms
become larger with the increase number of edge switch
failure rate from 0 to 0.01. EFAP outperform RANDOM
and HFAP in all the edge switch failure rate settings con-
sistently. HFAP performs badly in all settings. The reason
is that only host server failure is considered by HFAP.
There is a frequent interaction between a primary virtual
machine and its backup virtual machine because the
backup virtual machine is synchronized with the active
virtual machine periodically. Therefore, HFAP attempts
to place primary virtual machine and its backup virtual
machine on the same subnet but different host servers.
Many tasks may be interrupted from the critical stage
when an edge switch fails. A task fails when it is inter-
rupted from a critical stage. Instead of being restarted
from the last sub-stage, the execution time of the task is
lost.
As illustrated in Figs 5-7, RADDOM consumes the
most network resource, and HFAP consumes the least
network resource. That’s because HFAP attempts to place
the virtual machine with high inter-traffic on host servers
in the same subnet. Therefore, the data transfer does not
consume too many core layer and aggregation layer net-
work resources. However, the reliability cannot be en-
sured in HFAP. For attempting to spread virtual ma-
chines among host servers in the same pod but different
subnets, EFAP consumes very little core layer network
resource. Therefore, EFAP can avoid adding burden to
the bottleneck of data center but still enhance the service
reliability.
7 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we studies the network failure-aware re-
dundant virtual machine placement problem with the
consideration of the data center network resource con-
sumption. We formulate the network failure-aware re-
dundant virtual machine placement problem as an inte-
ger non-linear programming problem and prove that the
problem is NP-hard. An efficient heuristic algorithm is
proposed to solve the problem. Extensive simulations
show the effectiveness of our algorithm. We will experi-
ment real-world workload in our future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work presented in this study is supported by
NSFC (61602054), Beijing Natural Science Foundation
(4174100), and NSFC (61571066).
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