A Model-Based Approach for Optimizing Power Consumption of IaaS

Virtual Machine Image (VMI) provisioning is an important process of Infrastructure as a Service delivery model to provide virtual images in Cloud Computing. The power consumption and energy efficiency of VMI provisioning process depend not only on the hardware infrastructure, but also on the VMI's configuration, which helps to compose, configure and deploy VMIs in Cloud Computing environments. The major issue of improving the energy efficiency of VMI provisioning process is how to reduce the power consumption while ensuring the compatibility of software components installed in a virtual machine image. This paper describes a model-driven approach to improve the energy efficiency of VMI provisioning in Cloud Computing. This approach considers virtual images as product lines and uses feature models to represent their configurations. It uses model-based techniques to handle VMI specialization, automatic deployment and reconfiguration. The approach aims at minimizing the amount of unneeded software installed in VMIs, and thus to reduce the power consumption of VMI provisioning as well as the data transfer through the network.