Abstract
In a cloud environment, Virtual Machines (VMs) consolidation and resource provisioning are used to address the issues of workload fluctuations. VM consolidation aims to move the VMs from one host to another in order to reduce the number of active hosts and save power. Whereas resource provisioning attempts to provide additional resource capacity to the VMs as needed in order to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, these techniques have a set of limitations in terms of the additional costs related to migration and scaling time, and energy overhead that need further consideration. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive literature review on the subject of dynamic resource management (i.e., VMs consolidation and resource provisioning) in cloud computing environments, along with an overall discussion of the closely related works. The outcomes of this research can be used to enhance the development of predictive resource management techniques, by considering the awareness of performance variation, energy consumption and cost to efficiently manage the cloud resources.