The consolidation of virtual machine (VM) is the strategy of efficient and intelligent use of cloud datacenters resources. One of the important subproblems of VM consolidation is VM placement problem. The main objective of VM placement problem is to minimize the number of running physical machines or hosts in cloud datacenters. This paper focuses on solving VM placement problem with respect to the available bandwidth which is formulated as variable sized bin packing problem. Moreover, a new bandwidth allocation policy is developed and hybridized with an improved variant of whale optimization algorithm (WOA) called improved Lévy based whale optimization algorithm. Cloudsim toolkit is used in order to test the validity of the proposed algorithm on 25 different data sets that generated randomly and compared with many optimization algorithms including: WOA, first fit, best fit, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, and intelligent tuned harmony search. The obtained results are analyzed by Friedman test which indicates the prosperity of the proposed algorithm for minimizing the number of running physical machine. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.