Efficient two level scheduling in cloud computing environment

Cloud computing is an emerging IT paradigm. “Cloud computing” relies on sharing computing resources, rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. In other words, “Cloud computing” is the general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services through the internet. A cloud has three main characteristics, viz, it is sold on demand, it is elastic and the service is managed by the provider. Cloud vendors offer various levels of services to the users. Cloud vendors who offer Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), allow users to create Virtual Machines. These virtual machines are used to run the tasks submitted by the user. The resource allocation for each Virtual Machine is defined by the user and the Virtual machines are created on a physical machine, located at a remote place. Proper management of the available resources is essential for reducing the operating costs in a cloud. This paper focuses on a resource allocation problem that aims to minimize the operational cost in cloud computing. Total cost can be reduced by optimal allocation of Virtual Machines to hosts. An algorithm is also proposed so as to accurately map the Virtual Machines to hosts, thereby reducing the total cost and the same has been simulated using CloudSim. The results reveal that the proposed algorithm is very much cost-efficient.