During the last decades, energy costs have become responsible for a significant part of the operating costs of data centers. The rise of Cloud Computing has caused the construction of an increasingly growing number of data centers that consume more and more energy despite the implementation of more efficient hardware. Hence it is important for operators of data centers to use the available IT resources  more efficiently and to thus reduce energy costs.

A suitable means for enhancing energy efficiency is load distribution in the sense of placing and migrating virtual machines on/between physical servers for consolidation purposes. Due to the specific charactertistics of Clouds, however, load distribution in Cloud environments is anything but simple. One of the reasons for this is the fact that users are able to scale the provided resources one-sidedly according to their particular needs. This poses a specific difficulty regarding the load distribution in Cloud environments. The resource requirements in Clouds therefore vary strongly and thus complicate the efficient placing and migrating of virtual machines since the parameters for these activities vary constantly.

To be able to assess the effects of load distribution algorithms, their close investigation is necessary. For this purpose, a framework is meant to be acquired in the course of this research project which is supposed to conduct an investigation of the effects of load distribution algorithms on the energy consumption in Cloud data centers. The research results achieved so far will be presented in the context of the WI 2015.