Patent ID: 8402140

Claim:
A method for coordinating energy management in a virtualized data center comprising a plurality of physical servers and a plurality of virtual machines, the method comprising the steps of: analyzing in a computer process, status information about the virtualized data center; from the analyzed status information, determining in a computer process, server utilization target settings for server consolidation; and executing the server consolidation in a computer process, according to the determined server utilization target settings by determining an effective size of each of the virtual machines, the effective size of each of the virtual machines for determining a quantity of server resources that virtual machine will be allocated when placed on one of the physical servers; and placing the virtual machines on the servers in a selective manner, wherein the step of placing the virtual machines on the servers in a selective manner includes: (a) sorting the virtual machines in decreasing order according to their intrinsic load; (b) placing the virtual machines, according to the order obtained in step (a), on non-empty ones of the physical servers that yield minimal correlation-aware demands for respective ones of the virtual machines and have sufficient remaining capacity; (c) if the non-empty ones of the servers are not available for one or more of the virtual machines, placing the one or more virtual machines on empty ones of the physical servers that yield minimal correlation-aware demands for respective ones of the virtual machines and have sufficient remaining capacity; (d) repeating steps (b) and (c) until all the virtual machines have been placed on the physical servers.