Energy efficiency in SDDC: considering server and network utilities

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has eased the management and control of networks through separation of the control and data planes. Software defined data centers (SDDC) automate the management of end systems which are physical machines and virtual machines. In data centers, although there is a vast work on minimizing power consumption of physical machines and virtual machine migration performance, energy efficiency of the network components is given little attention. In this paper, a software-based energy efficiency framework that jointly minimizes the power consumption of end systems and network components in SDDC is proposed. Moreover, a novel physical server utility interval based metric, namely Ratio for Energy Saving of Physical Machines (RESPM) which measures how energy efficient the physical servers with respect to virtual machines residing within is proposed. To jointly maximize network energy efficiency and RESPM values, an Integer Programming (IP) formulation has been introduced. Experiments conducted on real-world virtual migration traces show that the proposed framework jointly reduces the power consumption of end systems and network components. The system has shown an improvement of 9% in RESPM, 35% energy saving in Ratio of Energy Saving in SDN (RESDN), and more than 50% in links saving.