With the emergence of cloud computing, computing resources (i.e., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) are provisioned as metered on-demand services over networks, and can be rapidly allocated and released with minimal management effort. In the cloud computing paradigm, the virtual machine is one of the most commonly used resource carriers in which business services are encapsulated. Virtual machine placement optimization, i.e., finding optimal placement schemes for virtual machines, and reconfigurations according to the changes of environments, become challenging issues.

The primary contribution of this licentiate thesis is the development and evaluation of our combinatorial optimization approaches to virtual machine placement in cloud environments. We present modeling for dynamic cloud scheduling via migration of virtual machines in multi cloud environments, and virtual machine placement for predictable and time-constrained peak loads in single-cloud environments. The studied problems are encoded in a mathematical modeling language and solved using a linear programming solver. In addition to scientific publications, this work also contributes in the form of software tools (in EU-funded project OPTIMIS) that demonstrate the feasibility and characteristics of the approaches presented.