  In the past few years, datacenter (DC) energy consumption has become an
important issue in technology world. Server consolidation using virtualization
and virtual machine (VM) live migration allows cloud DCs to improve resource
utilization and hence energy efficiency. In order to save energy, consolidation
techniques try to turn off the idle servers, while because of workload
fluctuations, these offline servers should be turned on to support the
increased resource demands. These repeated on-off cycles could affect the
hardware reliability and wear-and-tear of servers and as a result, increase the
maintenance and replacement costs. In this paper we propose a holistic
mathematical model for reliability-aware server consolidation with the
objective of minimizing total DC costs including energy and reliability costs.
In fact, we try to minimize the number of active PMs and racks, in a
reliability-aware manner. We formulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Linear
Programming (MILP) model which is in form of NP-complete. Finally, we evaluate
the performance of our approach in different scenarios using extensive
numerical MATLAB simulations.
