Coordinated resource provisioning and maintenance scheduling in cloud data centers

Lack of proper maintenance is the root cause of anywhere from a third to a half of downtime events in a cloud data center. To help safeguard the uptime of data centers, regular preventive maintenance must be conducted. During the maintenance time, some accommodated virtual machines (VMs) may be re-provisioned to the other available (backup) resource through migration, and some VMs may be terminated. One way that can allow a data center to perform all necessary preventive maintenance activities without causing too much disruption to VMs is to design an appropriate maintenance schedule. In this paper, given the available resource in a data center and the required maintenance activities with their deadlines, we consider the joint VM resource provisioning and maintenance scheduling problem to maximize the revenue of the data center. We tackle the problem by firstly proposing a heuristic for the resource provisioning under a given maintenance schedule. Using such a heuristic algorithm as the building block, we then propose another heuristic algorithm to solve the joint resource provisioning and maintenance scheduling problem and also derive its upper bound. Extensive simulations have shown that our proposed heuristic algorithms can effectively maximize the revenue of the data center.