Network failure–aware redundant virtual machine placement in a cloud data center

Summary 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. Because of 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 nonlinear 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.