40 Int. J. Business Intelligence and Data Mining, Vol. 14, Nos. 1/2, 2019 Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Network affinity aware energy efficient virtual machine placement algorithm R. Ranjana* Department of Information Technology, Sri Sai Ram Engineering College, Chennai, India Email: ranjana.g@gmail.com *Corresponding author S. Radha Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India Email: radhas@ssn.edu.in J. Raja Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Sai Ram Engineering College, Chennai, India Email: rajajanakiraman@gmail.com Abstract: Efficient mapping of virtual machine request to the available physical machine is an optimisation problem in data centres. It is solved by aiming to minimise the number of physical machines and utilising them to their maximum capacity. Another avenue of optimisation in data centre is the energy consumption. Energy consumption can be reduced by using fewer physical machines for a given set of VM requests. An attempt is made in this work to propose an energy efficient VM placement algorithm that is also network affinity aware. Considering the network affinity between VMs during the placement will reduce the communication cost and the network overhead. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using the Cloudsim toolkit and the performance in terms of energy consumed, communication cost and number of active PMs, is compared with the standard first fit greedy algorithm. Keywords: virtualisation; affinity aware; cloud computing; virtual machine placement; network affinity. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Ranjana, R., Radha, S. and Raja, J. (2019) ‘Network affinity aware energy efficient virtual machine placement algorithm’, Int. J. Business Intelligence and Data Mining, Vol. 14, Nos. 1/2, pp.40–53. Biographical notes: R. Ranjana is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Technology, Sri Sai Ram Engineering College. She has 16 years of teaching experience. She graduated in Computer Science and Engineering from the Madras University, in 2000. She has nearly 20