Optimal virtual machine placement across multiple cloud providers

Cloud computing provides users an efficient way to dynamically allocate computing resources to meet demands. Cloud providers can offer users two payment plans, i.e., reservation and on-demand plans for resource provisioning. Price of resources in reservation plan is generally cheaper than that in on-demand plan. However, since the reservation plan has to be acquired in advance, it may not fully meet future demands in which the on-demand plan can be used to guarantee the availability to the user. In this paper, we propose an optimal virtual machine placement (OVMP) algorithm. This algorithm can minimize the cost spending in each plan for hosting virtual machines in a multiple cloud provider environment under future demand and price uncertainty. OVMP algorithm makes a decision based on the optimal solution of stochastic integer programming (SIP) to rent resources from cloud providers. The performance of OVMP algorithm is evaluated by numerical studies and simulation. The results clearly show that the proposed OVMP algorithm can minimize users' budgets. This algorithm can be applied to provision resources in emerging cloud computing environments.