Fast development of knowledge and communication has established a new computational style which is known as cloud computing. One of the main issues considered by the cloud infrastructure providers, is to minimize the costs and maximize the profitability. Energy management in the cloud data centers is very important to achieve such goal. Energy consumption can be reduced either by releasing idle nodes or by reducing the virtual machines migrations. To do the latter, one of the challenges is to select the placement approach of the migrated virtual machines on the appropriate node. In this paper, an approach to reduce the energy consumption in cloud data centers is proposed. This approach adapts harmony search algorithm to migrate the virtual machines. It performs the placement by sorting the nodes and virtual machines based on their priority in descending order. The priority is calculated based on the workload. The proposed approach is simulated. The evaluation results show the reduction in the virtual machine migrations, the increase of efficiency and the reduction of energy consumption.