DEGSA-VMM

Purpose This paper aims to develop the Dragonfly-based exponential gravitational search algorithm to VMM strategy for effective load balancing in cloud computing. Due to widespread growth of cloud users, load balancing is the essential criterion to deal with the overload and underload problems of the physical servers. DEGSA-VMM is introduced, which calculates the optimized position to perform the virtual machine migration (VMM). Design/methodology/approach This paper presents an algorithm Dragonfly-based exponential gravitational search algorithm (DEGSA) that is based on the VMM strategy to migrate the virtual machines of the overloaded physical machine to the other physical machine keeping in mind the energy, migration cost, load and quality of service (QoS) constraints. For effective migration, a fitness function is provided, which selects the best fit that possess minimum energy, cost, load and maximum QoS contributing toward the maximum energy utilization. Findings For the performance analysis, the experimentation is performed with three setups, with Setup 1 composed of three physical machines with 12 virtual machines, Setup 2 composed of five physical machines and 19 virtual machines and Setup 3 composed of ten physical machines and 28 virtual machines. The performance parameters, namely, QoS, migration cost, load and energy, of the proposed work are compared over the other existing works. The proposed algorithm obtained maximum resource utilization with a good QoS at a rate of 0.19, and minimal migration cost at a rate of 0.015, and minimal energy at a rate of 0.26 with a minimal load at a rate of 0.1551, whereas with the existing methods like ant colony optimization (ACO), gravitational search algorithm (GSA) and exponential gravitational search algorithm, the values of QoS, load, migration cost and energy are 0.16, 0.1863, 0.023 and 0.29; 0.16, 0.1863, 0.023 and 0.28 and 0.18, 0.1657, 0.016 and 0.27, respectively. Originality/value This paper presents an algorithm named DEGSA based on VMM strategy to determine the optimum position to perform the VMM to achieve a better load balancing.