Improving Packing Algorithms for Server Consolidation

Overview

Minimizing the number of servers and preparing sufficient resources are contradictory requirements in server consolidation. These requirements can be formalized as a variant of the bin packing problem, which is known to be NP-hard. The least-loaded, a load-balancing algorithm, is applied to the problem and compared to the classical First-Fit Decreasing algorithm designed to address the bin packing problem. The technique of improving the algorithms is then presented.