With the emergence of cloud computing, computing resources (i.e., networks, servers, storage, applications, etc.) are provisioned as metered on-demand services over net- works, and can be rapidly allocated and released with minimal management effort. In the cloud computing paradigm, the virtual machine (VM) is one of the most com- monly used resource units in which business services are encapsulated. VM schedul- ing optimization, i.e., finding optimal placement schemes for VMs and reconfigu- rations according to the changing conditions, becomes challenging issues for cloud infrastructure providers and their customers.

The thesis investigates the VM scheduling problem in two scenarios: (i) single- cloud environments where VMs are scheduled within a cloud aiming at improving criteria such as load balancing, carbon footprint, utilization, and revenue, and (ii) multi-cloud scenarios where a cloud user (which could be the owner of the VMs or a cloud infrastructure provider) schedules VMs across multiple cloud providers, target- ing optimization for investment cost, service availability, etc. For single-cloud scenar- ios, taking load balancing as the objective, an approach to optimal VM placement for predictable and time-constrained peak loads is presented. In addition, we also present a set of heuristic methods based on fundamental management actions (namely, sus- pend and resume physical machines, VM migration, and suspend and resume VMs), continuously optimizing the profit for the cloud infrastructure provider regardless of the predictability of the workload. For multi-cloud scenarios, we identify key re- quirements for service deployment in a range of common cloud scenarios (including private clouds, bursted clouds, federated clouds, multi-clouds, and cloud brokering), and present a general architecture to meet these requirements. Based on this architec- ture, a set of placement algorithms tuned for cost optimization under dynamic pricing schemes are evaluated. By explicitly specifying service structure, component relation- ships, and placement constraints, a mechanism is introduced to enable service owners the ability to influence placement. In addition, we also study how dynamic cloud scheduling using VM migration can be modeled using a linear integer programming approach.

The primary contribution of this thesis is the development and evaluation of al- gorithms (ranging from combinatorial optimization formulations to simple heuristic algorithms) for VM scheduling in cloud infrastructures. In addition to scientific pub- lications, this work also contributes software tools (in the OPTIMIS project funded by the European Commissions Seventh Framework Programme) that demonstrate the feasibility and characteristics of the approaches presented.