Joint affinity aware grouping and virtual machine placement.

•Affinity of VMs models for VM placement resource allocation is proposed and an affinity aware VM placement (AAP) problem in cloud computing is stated.•A joint affinity aware grouping and bin packing (JAGBP) method is proposed to solve the AAP problem.•An affinity aware resource scheduling framework is designed and several scheduling algorithms including affinity aware grouping algorithm and bin packing heuristic algorithms are implemented.•Holistic experiments for evaluation are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.